Individual filing for married couples is the global OECD norm

Evidence

The better goal is marriage neutrality: Tax policy neither rewards nor punishes marriage, everyone files their own individual tax return, and marriage has little to no impact on your tax bill. For families who have been filing jointly for decades, this may seem like a big shift. But it’s actually a return to the origins of our tax system, and puts us in line with the rest of the world: Today more than two-thirds of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development already tax married couples as individuals. The United States is an outlier. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 158

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘marriage neutrality’ and contrasts it with joint filing as a US outlier.
• QUESTION: Canada’s 1917 individual-filing system merits deeper investigation as a policy model.