I haven’t written about gay marriage for the simple reason that I don’t think the state should have any role in marriage. That includes President Bush’s wasteful pro-marriage initiative.
That being said, I have one warning to my gay friends. You better look before you leap.
The internal revenue code punishes two-earner couples who are married. Here’s a succinct explanation from Bloomberg.
On the revenue side, the CBO estimated that gay marriage in all 50 states would increase tax receipts by about $400 million a year if the George W. Bush tax cuts were extended and by about $700 million a year if they were not. Because those tax cuts ended up being mostly extended, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but closer to $400 million. The added revenue comes from the “marriage penalty”: Two-earner married couples where each spouse has a similar income tend to be taxed more heavily than they would be if both partners were single. Other couples get a “marriage bonus,” generally when the spouses’ incomes are very unequal, but the marriage penalty effect is more important.
But you don’t have to believe me, or the reporters at Bloomberg. Here’s the tax computation worksheet for single taxpayers and married taxpayers from the IRS’s 1040 instruction manual (now more than 200-pages long!).
Fortunately, there’s a solution to this inequity. I invite Americans of all sexual preferences to defend marriage by embracing the flat tax, which – in addition to all the other good things it does – gets rid of the marriage penalty.
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it will be interesting to see how polygamy will fit into the welfare state equation…
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The greatest irony is that discrimination based on marital status has been made explicitly illegal in virtually every aspect of both public and private affairs; except for the most ubiquitous public affair: Taxation. If you are married and both spouses work, each one shall spend one extra hour per day serving “The People”. Why? Because they are a majority and they say so. So discrimination based on marital status is illegal, unethical etc… unless the majority desires it.
So while I welcome the end of different marriage treatment for gays, I regret that yet another group has joined the social engineering through the tax code environment. It is hard to celebrate that government (i.e. collective) intrusion into personal affairs has expanded into yet one more group. In addition, given a fixed size government, tax breaks on one group are essentially tax penalties on the other groups.
In electorates where a good dose of mandatory collectivism becomes a significant and acceptable philosophical approach, democracy quickly degenerates into Pitchfork-Democracy. These societies are destined into a vicious cycle of decline in a world where diversity, motivation and innovation are increasingly becoming the core determinants of prosperity. The vicious cycle is unleashed when deteriorating economic growth trendlines inevitably lead to electoral requests to even more collectivism. Politicians are, of course, more than happy to oblige, taking full advantage of increased demand for the services of their profession. That is why most western world electorates seem to be on a race to who will decline faster under the competitive pressure of three billion emerging world souls who, having gone from zero freedom to some freedom, are growing gangbusters and thus have neither the patience nor the desire to find out how the western world’s embracement of collectivism ends. Americans were late to join this vicious cycle. But they finally have!
The age of the smorgasbord (the gimme years) will be short. Grab what you can.
Not sure if trolling or just stupid.
Gay marriage proponents are not worried about the tax penalty. They are after the BENEFITS that they will receive as the legal partner of one who owns an insurance plan, pension or other bottomless money pit. They see this is the answer to “who will pay for my AIDS bills?” The answer is, of course, now it will be the American public.
[…] Dan Mitchell explains: […]