Singles could pay 40 percent more in taxes than equal-income married couples

Evidence

In practice, the singles’ penalty could amount to taxpayers paying 40 percent more in taxes than a married couple with the same household income. Imagine Unmarried Henry Seaborn: white, wealthy, and powerful, only without a wife. Unmarried Henry would be taxed on his 100,000 of income and pay 30,000 in taxes, whereas Married Henry would pay $10,000 because half the income was considered his wife’s and therefore taxed at a lower rate. Unmarried Henry viewed white, wealthy, and powerful single-wage-earner Married Henry as his “equal,” and he and his bachelor cohort considered the singles’ penalty unfair. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 117

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete mechanics of the singles’ penalty: income-splitting lets a married couple split $100,000 into two lower brackets.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the Grafting and Growth article’s method? No — better: it’s a clean mechanism example for the reader’s stated goal of naming tax provisions and how they work.