How Women Are Disadvantaged by the Tax Code and Social Security System

I’m not a big fan of the current tax system. I’m also not supportive of America’s bankrupt Social Security system.

The country would be much better off with fundamental reform of both the tax system and Social Security.

Some groups will be reap especially large rewards if that happens.

For instance, a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines the impact of taxes and Social Security on female labor supply.

…we ask to what extent the fact that taxes and old age Social Security benefits depend on one’s marital status discourages female labor supply and affect welfare. …as couples file taxes jointly, the secondary earner in the married couple faces a higher marginal tax rate, which tends to discourage their labor supply. …reduced labor supply does not necessarily imply lower Social Security benefits. Since women have historically been the secondary earners, both provisions tend to discourage female labor supply… to what extent are these disincentives holding it back? …We estimate our dynamic structural model using…data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for the cohort born in 1941-1945 (the “1945” cohort). …we also estimate our model for the 1951-1955 cohort (the “1955” cohort),

This chart from the study shows that married women face a tax penalty – i.e., higher marginal tax rates – compared to single women.

The main takeaway is that this marriage penalty, combined with discriminatory features of Social Security, discourages women from working.

How big is the effect?

The report, authored by Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Fang Yang, finds that government policies have a significant adverse impact on labor-force participation.

For the 1945 cohort, we find that Social Security spousal and survivor benefits and the current structure of joint income taxation provide strong disincentives to work to married women and single women who expect to get married… For instance, the elimination of all of these marriage-based rules raises participation at age 25 by over 20 percentage points for married women and by five percentage points for single women. At age 45, participation for these groups is, respectively, still 15 and 3 percentage point higher without these marital benefits provisions. In addition, these marriage-based rules reduce the participation of married men starting at age 55, resulting in a participation that is 8 percentage points lower by age 65. Finally, for these cohorts, these marital provisions decrease the savings of married couples by 20.3% at age 66.1 In terms of welfare, abolishing these marital provisions would benefit…over ninety percent of the people in this cohort. …We find that the effects for the 1955 cohort on participation, wages, earnings, and savings are large and similar to those in the 1945 cohort, thus indicating that the effects of marriage-related provisions are large also for cohorts in which the labor participation of married women is higher.

What if these discriminatory policies were fixed?

It depends, of course, on how the problems are addressed.

The report finds that a budget-neutral approach (i.e., returning any budgetary windfall to taxpayers) would be a significant net plus.

…there would also be large aggregate gains from removing marriage related provisions and reducing the income tax… Overall our policy experiments thus indicate that removing marriage related taxes and Social Security benefits would increase female labor supply and the welfare of the majority of the populations.

Here are a couple of charts from the study, showing both an increase in labor supply and an increase in labor income.

I’ll close with a final point about family structure.

Some people will argue that the current penalties in the tax code and Social Security system are desirable because they don’t punish stay-at-home moms as much as working women.

That’s a very strange argument. Sort of like the folks on the left, including the IMF, who advocate policies that hurt the poor if rich people suffer even more.

P.S. If there’s reform, older people also will enjoy significant gains.