EITC joint-filing rules penalize marriage to near-poverty for low-income workers

Evidence

Now let’s say she meets a man with no children who earns 20,000. Because he's single and has no children, his salary is too high to qualify him for the EITC. If they want to get married, EITC rules require them to file a joint return—but when they do, it cuts her benefit to 2,626. If she were a high-earning home healthcare provider, with a salary of 30,000, the same circumstance would cut her EITC from 3,512 to zero. For families in this situation, losing 5 percent of their income is significant, and getting married should not be the choice that sends them into poverty. (Never mind that the EITC is incredibly complex, results in high rates of error, and those who claim it are twice as likely to be audited as high-income Americans.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 141

Categorization

• XREF: The joint-filing requirement is a concrete race-neutral mechanism the reader needs; connects to dual-earner penalty theme.
• SEED: The ‘marriage as a poverty-causing choice’ framing for a low-income worker is a strong essay angle on perverse tax incentives.
• SHARE: The 5-percent-of-income loss and the audit disparity would interest anyone working on tax fairness.