The joint tax return rewards one-income couples and punishes dual-earner black households

Evidence

The joint tax return exists because back in 1930, a wealthy white shipbuilder named Henry Seaborn convinced the Supreme Court to impute half of his taxable income to his stay-at-home wife, Charlotte, lowering his taxes. Congress gave all Americans access to the joint return in 1948. The policy rewarded people like the Seaborns, allowing a couple who could easily get by with one income to split it down the middle to avoid being taxed at the highest rate. But that same policy punished the Browns, who were striving to save and build a better future for themselves and their children and needed every penny of their two paychecks to do so. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 66

Categorization

• SEED: The racial history of the married joint return — born from a wealthy white shipbuilder’s tax avoidance — is a tight article nugget pairing tax law with racial equity.
• XREF: Pairs with racial wealth gap scholarship; also resonates with the ‘decorum toward corpses’ reading about contingent policy origins encoding privilege.