Immigration and Taxes
Several recent news items and commentaries highlight the injustice and illogic of using relationship status to determine immigration status or tax rate.
Marriage makes it easier to immigrate, but if you lose your spouse, you lose your immigration status. AtMP supports efforts to make immigration policy more fair (read our whole statement here). As always, we’d like to see all partners treated equally, regardless of marital status or gender. Debanuj Dasgupta (my co-panelist at a conference last Saturday) makes a good point: letting US citizens sponsor their partners expands the rights only of US citizens, but is not an expansion of immigrants’ rights. Is that really all we want?
Marriage will lower your federal income taxes if only one spouse has an income, but raise your taxes if both spouses make good money. Our friend Dennis J. Ventry Jr. calls it a “Stay-At-Home-Spouse Tax Subsidy,” or “Married Families Are Better Than Any Other Families Tax Subsidy.” This tax policy is based on outdated assumptions about work and gender roles (Debra Siegel’s observations about high income one-earner married couples demonstrate why we’d want to encourage more egalitarian relationships through our tax code).
States also use the standard deduction to promote one-earner marriages. For example, Rhode Island is proposing to end its “marriage penalty” by making a married couple’s standard deduction twice as big as a single person’s. This is unfair because single taxpayers will have to make up the difference, or do without public services. But maybe there’s a silver lining: with all the bad news about layoffs, RI could market its new “unemployed spouse stimulus package.” I can just see the ad campaigns: “Lost your job? Ran out of unemployment benefits? You can earn up to $7500 by getting married (to someone who still has a job, of course)!” or, “Employed? Take advantage of this great offer: Marry someone who’s jobless, and you’ll be eligible for a $7500 tax deduction!”
