Random, taxes, a quote

[flexagon]

Welcome to new friends: I made an intro post over in the 2017revival community and have picked up some new readers/friends as a result. I'm hoping that some will stick, and offset a bit of the disgruntlement I feel at how quickly LJ has left my life.

Taxes happened this weekend, and brought to light exactly how much more I make right now than my husband (no DW name yet). It got awkward when he didn't want to split the bill evenly, but an hour of calculating "married filing singly" shut up my whining: that is a hellscape made of razor blades, and I would have owed a lot more alone than we do together. So we ended up splitting it proportionally to our income and calling it a day. It's funny... we've had all kinds of different income ratios over the years, and every year we decide something different regarding fairness at tax time. Radical idea: maybe the government should stop caring whether people are married. But that might be unrealistic... there's a lot of economic thinking baked into the current legal idea of "marriage", and one change would probably mean a cascade of changes. The right set of changes isn't obvious and would definitely not be an easy political win for anyone trying to push it.

A quote: From Ursula K Leguin's The Dispossessed, on the topic of deserving things and not deserving things.

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

Comments

[motyl]

Most years we calculate joint tax burden, do a quick shred of our joint filing to estimate filing singly, then make sure our net contributions are the same percentage they would be if you added single filings together. I've gotten it down to an art - about 10 minutes of poking around with H&R block and a spreadsheet.
Last year I just paid all we owed. This year I got cranky thinking I was shorting myself and went back to doing the math. The result was I got to pay all our federal taxes owed *and* give the giant MA refund to my spouse. That's what I get for being stingy :-P

[flexagon]

Haha! We considered three things to split it proportionally by: proportional by what married filing singly would have been, proportional to income (estimated by good old box 1 on the W2s, since our stock sales were small in comparison), and proportional to [box1 - box2] which was meant to take care of the case where someone over- or under-withheld federal taxes.

My husband didn't feel right about the first one, particularly given that he's on my health insurance; and options 2 and 3 came out really similar, so we did one of those, plus fudging for the deltas in my health insurance costs.

I didn't know you were active here... did the DW revival bring you back around?

[motyl]

At some point we had pretty good bill balance, my health insurance balanced by my husband paying car and maybe house. I suspect rising costs have gotten that out of whack but I care correspondingly less so it's all good. It's always heartening hearing of other couples who don't default combine finances and don't, say, give me fishy looks like I'm planning for divorce or am horribly selfish or something.

I've been following lj (now dw) ~biweekly for ages but mostly lurk. I responded to your spring break post though so not a *total* lurker!