The joint tax return system penalizes dual-earner couples with equal incomes

Evidence

On average married black women contribute 40 percent to household income compared with only 29 percent for white women. … Simply put, all wives did not contribute to their households in the same way: Black women were likely to earn as much (or more) money as their husbands, while white women were likely to earn much less. This was certainly true in the case of my parents (whose income was more or less equal most years). But the joint tax return system, under which most married couples file their taxes together, offers the greatest benefits to households where one spouse contributes much less than the other to household income. That meant couples like my parents—my hardworking, home-owning, God-fearing parents, who wanted to earn a little bit more to enjoy their lives after raising two daughters—weren’t getting those breaks. My parents’ tax bill was so high because they were married to each other. Marriage—which many conservatives assure us is the road out of black poverty—is in fact making black couples poorer. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 36

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the concrete mechanism of the joint return provision: benefits accrue to single-earner households, not dual-earner ones.
• SHARE: The 40% vs 29% statistic about black vs white married women’s household income contribution is a striking, specific figure worth sending to anyone interested in tax fairness or family economics.
• XREF: Connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ insofar as both are about policy and norms operating through ostensibly neutral structures — though the tax mechanism here is far more concrete.