Marriage penalties and bonuses after 1969 affected couples by income split, not race

Evidence

A single wage earner making half that income—22,500 (half of 45,000)—had a marginal tax rate of 40 percent. But if two singles each earning 22,500 got married—and statistically, if they were a black couple, kept earning two incomes—their last 1,000 of income (income greater than 44,000) was taxed at 50 percent, an increase of 10 percentage points from what they paid as unmarried individuals. A household with one wage earner making 45,000 a year and one earning no income—statistically speaking, most likely a white couple—had a marginal tax rate of 50 percent, too. But this represents a decrease of 10 percentage points from the single wage earner’s marginal tax rate when unmarried. When the two 22,500 wage earners get married, their marginal tax rates increase from 40 to 50 percent, but when the 45,000 wage earner marries a nonworking spouse, his marginal tax rate decreases from 60 to 50 percent. That is how married white couples got a tax cut and married black couples paid higher taxes for equal household income. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 122

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the structural-mechanism argument the reader is building: a facially neutral rule (tax brackets by income split) produces race-correlated outcomes because black couples are statistically likelier to be dual-earner. Relevant to any of the reader’s articles on how neutral rules encode disparate impact.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s documented theme of structural racism as mechanism — facial neutrality plus unequal starting conditions equals engineered disparity — here instantiated in tax law.