Marriage Penalty
It looks like the House is trying to make changes to the tax code regarding marriage penalty permanent, which I suppose is a good thing, although it is unclear whether the Senate is going to take this up. I am somewhat unimpressed with our tax savings this year from the reduction in the marriage penalty, but any relief is welcome. I thought this was designed so that our taxes would essentially be as if we were filing as singles, but that wasn't the case at all.
Ultimately, I would still be better off if there was no "married filing jointly" or "married filing separately". It seems like you could accomplish what is intended by applying some kind of "head of the household" status to families with just one wage earner and just tax all income earners equally. This would reduce the complexity of the tax code and there wouldn't be a marriage penalty or any marriage bonuses. But, I guess that would make things too easy.
It looks like the House is trying to make changes to the tax code regarding marriage penalty permanent, which I suppose is a good thing, although it is unclear whether the Senate is going to take this up. I am somewhat unimpressed with our tax savings this year from the reduction in the marriage penalty, but any relief is welcome. I thought this was designed so that our taxes would essentially be as if we were filing as singles, but that wasn't the case at all.
Ultimately, I would still be better off if there was no "married filing jointly" or "married filing separately". It seems like you could accomplish what is intended by applying some kind of "head of the household" status to families with just one wage earner and just tax all income earners equally. This would reduce the complexity of the tax code and there wouldn't be a marriage penalty or any marriage bonuses. But, I guess that would make things too easy.
