They might want to look into not being married.
Wow. Just wow. For some people, marriage is more than a financial arrangement.
They'd also save a bundle by not having kids. Maybe they should sell one of them, it would help pay for the others?
Wow. Just wow. For some people, marriage is more than a financial arrangement.
They'd also save a bundle by not having kids. Maybe they should sell one of them, it would help pay for the others?
Marriage in the legal sense and marriage in the religious/personal/emotional commitment sense are not the same thing. I don't think you're necessarily _always_ wrong, but I also don't see why you think it's so universal that people should load a specific legal status with so much emotional weight and be unable to separate it from the actual commitment, in the context of meaningfulness.
If I have a religious ceremony during which I get married to someone, I would consider myself married even if I didn't file the papers at the courthouse. The latter is just paperwork. I can't say I relate to the notion that a relationship between two people doesn't have meaning until you get the government to approve it.
I suggest you read some court filings/legal articles on the gay marriage cases from a few years ago to get an understanding of why people sued to have the right to get legally married, over and above just having an emotional commitment.
I suggest you read the threads you're participating in before smugly assuming that someone else is the one who doesn't know what they're talking about.
That said the #1 reason that marriages fail is finances and I can imagine divorce would be massively net positive it if alleviated the financial desperation this family feels, allows them to spend time together vs working overtime and gives them healthcare they wouldn't have access to otherwise.
The downsides of not being legally married honestly seem trivial in comparison to the realities of poverty.
Marriage and family are contexts within which people are willing and/or liable to make life and death decisions which transcend fiscal considerations. The combination of a tax code and economic circumstances that (perhaps unintentionally) incentivize the breakup of families and the loss of rights for short-term economic reasons is not politically sustainable.
Marriage should be strictly a religious or social status with no official government recognition.
I don't understand this. If I turn up at the hospital you're in and claim you are my (opposite sex) spouse (with the same surname), do the hospital staff demand to see a certificate of marriage registration and then perform a search to ensure there is no state issued marriage annulment?
No, you don't need to have the same last name to visit your sick partner, but when people start accusing eachother of lying, it will sure help.
Marriage is a responsibility, but it also provides rights. A system that financially punishes marriage is cruel.
In the eyes of the government the only thing in marriage that's more than a financial arrangement is hospital visitation privileges and the right to not testify against your spouse.
I didn't say to annul their wedding vows or diminish whatever non-financial meaning their marriage has.
> They'd also save a bundle by not having kids. Maybe they should sell one of them, it would help pay for the others?
That's disgusting.
For sure, but you don't have to tell the government about it. You can still have a ceremony and wear rings and swear you'll live together until you die. Informally, you can pretty much have whatever kind of marriage you want, even a polygamous one. No-one is going to stop a bunch of people from living together as roommates in some kind of committed relationship. Although I just checked, and some of these relationships are actually illegal in Canada [1]. I think it's really just to protect minors, and they don't care what a bunch of adults are doing.
EDIT: Haha I also just noticed your username
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_polygamy#North_Ame...
Marriage penalties and bonuses are a consequence of joint filing combined with a progressive rate structure. They continue to exist because to get rid of them would require giving up either join filing or progressive rates, and it is very unlikely that people would go for giving up one or both of those.
There's more than one way to make ends meet and I'd be happy to see the wide variety of elaborate tax breaks available to high-income sorts based on elaborate business constructs removed to make up for this rather than punish young married couples. But then, I'm all for a mostly flat tax, warts and all, no deductions whatsoever, past a certain level of income, say the national median.