Marriage penalty reforms arrived only as white women entered dual-earner households.

Evidence

The penalties enacted in the law protected the labor market advantage of white men by encouraging their competition—white women—to stay out of the paid workforce. … The majority of married couples27 have always received a marriage bonus, and today roughly 95 percent of married couples file tax returns jointly. But over time, as more white women joined the paid labor market and were hit with the marriage penalty, Congress began to make efforts to minimize it. My research based on the 1990 census, for example, showed that for households earning between 60,000 and 90,000, there were more white married couples where both partners worked and earned roughly the same income (putting them in the marriage penalty category) than there were couples where one spouse made no income (providing them the marriage bonus). In all other income ranges, white couples were still largely getting a bonus when they got married. But the trend was clear, and beginning in 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law tax cuts eliminating marriage penalties for married couples earning less than $56,800. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the standing-directive insight: policy changes when the aggrieved group is privileged, mirroring the singles-tax-reform dynamic.