Tax-free employer perks compound the advantage of single-earner households

Evidence

But those aren’t the only advantages Henry and Charlotte receive. Henry, as a six-figure employee, is far more likely to also have health insurance, a retirement account, and other tax-free perks that come with his job (as we will see in chapter 4). Again, if our tax laws did not exempt those employer-provided benefits from being counted as wages, Henry and Charlotte’s household income would be significantly greater than Dottie and James’s and taxed accordingly—even assuming, unrealistically, that both couples were receiving identical employer-provided perks. (The value of an employer’s percentage match on a retirement account associated with a 100,000 job is much greater than it would be for a 50,000 job.) In order to accommodate Henry and Charlotte and other couples like them, tax policy stretches the definition of “equal” so far as to break it. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 107

Categorization

• XREF: The percentage-match asymmetry previews the retirement-account angle developed in chapter 4 — flagged for prospective payoff.