Equating equal income with equal circumstances hides the joint return’s racial bias

Evidence

What I did learn was the concept of “horizontal equity,” which requires that taxpayers in similar circumstances should be taxed the same. As it’s typically taught, horizontal equity looks at income as a marker of similar circumstances. For example, if two married couples, each with 100,000 of combined income, pay the same amount in taxes regardless of how much each spouse contributes, that satisfies the horizontal equity requirement. … When I looked at my parents' marriage, however, I began to realize that what I learned about horizontal equity was incorrect, or at least incomplete. Income and circumstances are not the same: A married couple with one working spouse, an investment banker, who makes 100,000 is not in the same circumstances as a nurse and a plumber who each earn $50,000. When viewed through a racial lens, we see that the latter situation is more likely for black taxpayers than white ones—and worse, the tax break goes to the single-earner couple, not the dual-earner couple. Our tax policy does all this in the name of horizontal equity, with no consideration that when you look beyond total income, the concept is just plain wrong! — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 41

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines horizontal equity and then dismantles its usual income-only framing — the core conceptual move of the book.
• SEED: The investment banker/spouse vs nurse+plumber comparison is a crisp, teachable illustration of how ‘equal income’ masks unequal circumstance — a natural essay or explainer angle.
• XREF: connects to: Manipulated statistics presented old-stock dominance as proportionate fairness. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1931; Schooling’s income payoff is twice as high for white males — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 923