Archive for September, 2009

Bad news on hospital rights

Today we got terribly disappointing news from Lambda Legal: a FL court has dismissed the potentially ground-breaking case which we hoped would have created a legal basis for the widespread assumption that hospital patients have a right to visitation.

The court ruled that the hospital has neither an obligation to allow their patients’ visitors nor any obligation whatsoever to provide their patients’ families, healthcare surrogates, or visitors with access to patients in their trauma unit.

This is not a gay issue, nor a same-sex marriage issue, nor even an unmarried issue. Everyone who is concerned about patients’ rights should be outraged, and this court ruling should spark a statewide movement in FL at the very least, if not an addendum to national health reform legislation. We’ll be strategizing about what AtMP can or should do… suggestions welcome!

Better ways to fix what’s left of the income tax marriage penalty

Last week Forbes magazine ran a commentary by two Notre Dame professors about the income tax penalty faced by low-income couples who marry.

The Bush tax cuts attempted to make tax rates “marriage-neutral”; for most middle-class taxpayers, there is now, in fact, little if any difference between filing as a married couple or as unmarried singles. … [But a] single parent earning $21,000 with two children would receive an earned income credit and child tax credit of $5,460. Say that same parent is living with, but not married to, another single parent with two children who earns the same amount. Their combined income is $42,000. Unmarried and filing their taxes separately, they would receive a total of $10,920 in earned income credits and child tax credits. If they were to marry and file jointly (listing four dependent children), they would receive only $3,400 in earned income credits and child credits. So it would cost them $7,520 to be married. To make the situation worse, this “penalty” will occur every year, adding up over time to a huge amount.

AtMP believes that taxing people based on their marital status is wrong, and that it’s especially wrong to tax lower-income people more heavily than higher-income for the exact same behavior (in this case, marrying). Naturally, we’re less concerned than those professors about rising rates of cohabitation. More importantly, we’ve heard more creative solutions than the two options they propose:

If you “remove” the marriage penalty by lowering the credits for single taxpayers, you invoke the wrath of those who would say you’re “raising” taxes (by reducing their credits) on people who can least afford it. On the other hand, if you raise the credits for married taxpayers to the point where getting married offers the same tax result as being single, you’ve got a budgetary issue–where is the money to compensate for these additional credits going to come from?

In fact, we printed another professor’s more creative solutions in our newsletter last year!

Given the many forms of modern families, two policy alternatives are clearly preferable…. First, policymakers should expand the definition of family for tax purposes to include unmarried opposite- and same-sex couples, single parents, cohabiting unmarried family members, and perhaps even platonic roommates demonstrating economic interdependence. These families share the same kind of expenses, responsibilities, and liabilities as married families. There is no reason for the tax system to treat them differently. Under an expanded definition of the family unit, “marriage” penalties would become “family” penalties, and doubling tax brackets for families would benefit all multi-person households.

Second, we could abandon the family as a unit of taxation altogether and move to a system of individual filing. This approach would effectively eliminate all marriage tax penalties. As importantly—and unlike preserving the family as a unit of taxation—individual filing would eliminate the secondary-earner bias in the tax system that currently taxes the first dollar earned of the lesser-earning spouse (disproportionately women) at the higher rates associated with the last dollar earned of the primary-earning spouse.

Either approach—expanding our concept of “family” under the family tax unit or adopting as the norm the individual unit—would more effectively address the concerns of the modern American family in its various forms.

Arizona takes back gifts it gave unmarried couples

Among the news reports filtering in during Unmarried and Single Americans Week, it is upsetting to find that the state of Arizona has rescinded the domestic partnership benefits it had just recently extended to state employees.

Although DP benefits are often wrongly described as a “gay rights” issue, the article points out that more than 3/4 of the employees receiving benefits were in different-sex couples. That fits what we hear all over. In 2006 the NYC media reported that different-sex couples made up 3/4 of NYC registered domestic partners.

In fact, Pablo, the AtMP intern working on plus-one benefits for federal employees, discovered these facts about state employees:

Washington State – The Human Resources Department reported a positive boost in recruitment and retention since instituting benefits for both same- and different-sex partners.
Vermont – the earliest state to champion equal benefits for both same-sex and different-sex partners, it found initial, marginal increases in premium costs but ultimately saw no effect on state costs.
New York State – covers over 4,880 employees’ domestic partners, and the majority of these are different-sex partners. New York reports that the plan has been easy to implement.

Gifts for Unmarried & Single Americans Week

Last week we discovered that it’s not easy to send an e-card for USA Week. How about sending a gift? Today I received a sweet gift from Ellen Kaye in the form of a fresh list of unmarried songs to add to our collection.

Today I also added a gift to my wish list: the new book Changing Poverty, Changing Policies, featuring an essay by Cancian and Reed which finds that

the economic benefit of marriage isn’t what it used to be … because single women, even those with kids, have an easier time supporting themselves outside of marriage than they used to. [And ] that replicating marriage wouldn’t necessarily generate more per-person wealth.

Thanks to Jessica the intern for finding the Time Magazine article about this new book. I look forward to incorporating more of its findings into our campaign to get marriage programs out of the federal anti-poverty budget.

Our very own Hallmark moment?

Unmarried and Single Americans Week starts Sunday!

Thanks to April for pointing out that Hallmark is missing out on a hundred-million strong market for e-cards. It takes a few moments, but you can register your request for an e-card here.

Recession’s impact on unmarriage

The news that one-third of workers under age 35 live with their parents really caught my eye, because one of the big factors in people’s likelihood to marry is whether they feel economically independent. It is probably fair to predict that the longer people feel economically unstable, the later they’ll put off marriage, and the larger the unmarried population will grow.

Though much of the article is about union organizing, it is full of economic and cultural insights that make it worth reading in its entirety. For example:

In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

News like this makes it especially infuriating that the federal government and many states spend over $150 million per year on marriage programs instead of helping low-income people get and keep jobs.

Of course, some people do make marital decisions regardless of their economic situation, as the article nicely captures:

After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we’d never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We’d like to have children, but we just can’t manage the expense of it right now…so we’re putting it off till we’re in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.

I’ve also seen articles about the recession causing couples to delay divorce. But my instinct says that people increasingly delaying marriage will have bigger demographic impact.

1 in 5 Gay & Lesbian Leaders Not Interested in Marriage

I get bi-weekly emails from Gay & Lesbian Leadership SmartBrief. Sometimes I don’t read them right away, so I missed my chance to vote in their latest reader poll. So add one to the results, which show nearly 20% of self-identified leaders are not interested in marriage.

Given what we know about American demographics, it’s likely that a much, much higher percentage of average gay and lesbian people are also not interested in marriage. I’m all for everyone having the right to marry, but I’d be delighted to see more resources flowing towards securing other rights: health care, economic security, housing, etc!

The poll question: Where will you get married? The results: