Marriage barely benefits dual-earning couples who split income evenly

Evidence

Take Greg and Kristen Galloway, a black Atlanta couple whom I think of as the twenty-first-century version of my parents. Kristen and Greg have been married since 2015 and have one child, born the same year. They own a single-family home in Tucker, Georgia, about half an hour from downtown Atlanta, and both work full-time: Greg as the operations manager at the CNN Store, Kristen as an administrative assistant at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. In 2019, Greg earned 58,389 working approximately a forty-hour week; Kristen earned 51,003.26, working about the same. Both have health benefits, a 401(k), and personal time off—but because Kristen’s wages are 46 percent of household income, Greg and Kristen are the typical marriage-penalty couple. Due to the 2017 tax cuts, if they filed a joint return and took the standard deduction, their taxable income after deducting the standard deduction would be 84,992.26, with a tax bill, according to the IRS tax tables, of 10,412. If they simply lived together and filed individually, their combined tax bills would be roughly the same; marriage earns them a $70 bonus under the new law. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete working example that defines a ‘marriage-penalty couple’ — dual earners with roughly even income split.