Random, taxes, a quote
Apr. 17th, 2017 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonWelcome to new friends: I made an intro post over in the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.”
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.”
no subject
Date: 2017-04-21 02:00 pm (UTC)It's my sense that the number of married couples with comparable incomes is vastly outweighed by the number of such couples that have (often widely) disparate incomes. I haven't run numbers in several years - the joy of having an accountant do our taxes - but I trust their judgment that even with my wife running her own business it is still significantly advantageous for us to file jointly. Make of that what you will, I don't claim to have any real data.
it might be time to revisit the total benefits and consider incentivizing pair-bonding in some other way besides a complex tax code
That wraps together a whole lot of issues that are very hard to tease apart. If you agree (as I do) that tax policies exist in part to incentivize more of the things we (popularly, and as the US government) want I think it's always going to be complex. The mortgage interest deduction, for example, is essentially a huge give-away to families that are far from the most needy. However, we accept that home ownership leads to more stable neighborhoods (safer, more prosperous, better for businesses, etc) so it's taken to be in everyone's interest to have higher rates of home ownership. Is that a good idea? I'm not so sure, though I've benefited from it hugely myself.
Then there's the basic need of taxes to bring in revenue and although we continually operate at a deficit we generally agree that's a bad thing (debt is good; deficit is bad). So revenue needs to be raised and we also have something of a consensus that the system should be progressive to some degree. That, too, adds complications not just because you have to have multiple brackets but because you have to have rules about what does and does not count toward a given bracket.
And finally, there's the extremely thorny question of how (other than taxation) the government ought to incentivize behavior. The tools the government has at hand tend to be crude, and punitive. That's good for discouraging unwanted behaviors but less good for incentivizing desired behaviors. I'm currently imagining the IRS reworked as a giant game-theory machine and while it'd make for a good SF story I don't think it's something I'd like to live under. I have enough trouble with the current set of marketing giants (Google, Apple, FB, etc.) treating the world that way.
how about a straight-up tax credit for married folk
Theoretically simple, but the devil is in the details as always.