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Comment by dmux | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to get a percentage that are "happily" married vs. married (or stay married) for the tax benefits.

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Until just a couple years ago, there was a tax penalty for married couples who earned similar amounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty

> If the incomes of the two persons are similar, then at the lower end of the tax schedule there is no difference between filing as singles and filing as a married couple (ignoring the question of deductions, see below). But at the higher end of the tax schedule, there is a penalty for a married couple whose incomes are similar, compared to what they would pay as singles.

The penalty still exists and my taxes and my wife's went up because we are both relatively high earners (huge student loan debts and our annual incomes only became larger than $20-30K in our 30s since college/grad school took a long time). I am not sure what the rationale for marriage affecting taxes in the US was originally, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Presumably if one's spouse didn't work they could have just been claimed as an additional dependent.

Nowadays, the penalty only exists if you have incomes of $500k+ and/or if you have more than $24k in deductions and need to itemize.

https://www.fool.com/taxes/2018/11/15/the-irs-marriage-penal...

As far as I know at least.

> I am not sure what the rationale for marriage affecting taxes in the US was originally, but it doesn't make much sense to me.

I assume it’s because at the time the tax brackets which penalized dual high income earning households were decided, they weren’t politically powerful (or numerous) enough to push back on them. Nowadays, dual high income earning households are more common and they had the ability to get the brackets changed.

In the 1950s women didn't hold a job outside of the house (raising their own kids is a hard job). This isn't completely unheard of today, but it is very rare (also not sexist - I personally know as many men as women who don't have a job outside the home). In this model it is useful to claim a deduction for your spouse.

The statistics for 1950 actually have 44% of women between 16-24 having some kind of job, 34% of women between 24-34 and 39% of women between 34-44.

What you describe was middle class white femalehood ideal - what was supposedly happiest setup. But that setup was impossible for quite a lot of families, plus some families choose different setup. And some women were single or their husbands die.

But the actual labor participation was much higher then what the ideal suggests.

But they were paid a lot less than men at the time.

Yes and jobs were also much different. And completely different ratio of these is going to be part vs full time. I am not saying 1950 was feminists utopia or something.

But it is interesting how around 40% women working morphed into women were not working which morphed into idea that working woman would be rare.

I want to point out that as the originator of this line of thought in the discussion I fully endorse your last paragraph.

> married for the tax benefits

Does this offset the risk of divorce?

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