Unmarried Blog

Make taxes more fair by removing marriage factor

Many thanks to Jim (and to Bitsy, and Dennis, who both tried earlier) for getting me to finally read Lily Kahng’s paper on “eliminating marriage as a basis for preferential treatment under the tax law.” What a pleasant surprise to discover that she references AtMP’s advocacy on income taxes, as well as Jim’s extensive research and analysis (marriagePenalty.xls, best accessed here). Of course, we agree completely with Kahng’s conclusion: “The joint return is unsupportable and should be abolished.”

Quoting (with permission) Jim’s post to AtMP-Talk, our email listserv:

all my work, and all AtMP’s work for that matter, compares two unmarried people vs. a married couple, i.e. ALWAYS TWO people compared to TWO people. I believe comparing the tax burden of one person to that of two people is an apple vs. oranges comparison. But I do strongly agree with her that the plight of the uncoupled single (someone who doesn’t have someone else to collaborate with on splitting credits and deductions and even income to minimize taxes) is being left out of practically all studies and discussion of the marriage bonus/penalty issue.

For those who hate numbers and taxes, Kahng’s paper is about much more than that – she surveys attitudes to singles, all kinds of advocacy and alternatives to married groups, discrimination (other than taxes), and other sociology of singles topics. So you can skip over the tax stuff if you want and enjoy the sociology stuff.

For example, here are Kahng’s closing words:

Moving beyond the tax system, recognizing the value of singleness can help us interrogate and critique the role of government and citizens in promoting and supporting marriage. For example, the same-sex marriage debate might be informed by considerations of whether the legal, economic, and social privileges of marriage ought to be expanded further, or rather eliminated entirely. Similarly, we might further question the role of the government in promoting marriage as a solution to poverty, especially for African American women. Instead, marriage could come to be viewed as one among many alternatives. (link added)

Preserving great care time for federal employees

Interesting news on care time – my nickname for the right to take time off work to care for someone else’s health without getting fired.

Federal employees have long had one of the best care time policies – they have been allowed to leave to care for their “spouse, and parents thereof; children, including adopted children, and spouses thereof; parents; brothers and sisters, and spouses thereof; and any individual related by blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.”

AtMP has long encouraged this definition to be included in the Family and Medical Leave Act so it would apply to all workers.

This week the Office of Personnel Management issued a clarifying regulation “to promote consistent application of policy across the Federal Government, and to allow the Federal Government to serve as a model employer” by “making the definitions of family member and immediate relative more explicit to include more examples of relationships that are covered.” Fortunately, OPM notes

that it would be very difficult to list each and every type of family member or immediate relative, as it would be very difficult to consider all the variations of a contemporary family. The fact that a specific relationship is not expressly included in these definitions is not meant to diminish the familial bond, or to imply that leave may not be used to care for a person with that relationship.

It is also really great that OPM spells out that it

does not normally require proof of a domestic partnership for the purpose of leave administration. For example, an agency does not typically request specific documentation to prove an employee’s relationship with his or her family member (e.g., parent, spouse, sister, brother). We find that agencies are in the best position to administer their own leave programs and should follow the same procedure for all employees.

I certainly hope that more employers will look to OPM as a model!

making the definitions of family
member and immediate relative more explicit to include more examples of
relationships that are covered

Marital status is a matter of religious freedom

Today’s news is that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan once approved marital status discrimination in housing, saying that a landlord’s religious views trumped an unmarried couple’s fair housing rights. AtMP opposes her nomination unless she recants.

In addition to the obvious parallels with discrimination against LGBT people, I hope the public conversation highlights the fact that many people see marital status as a matter of religious expression.

To be truly empathetic with the American public, Supreme Court Justices must understand that some individuals and couples eschew marriage because they believe that it is a purely religious institution. For example, in a discussion posted on AtMP’s Facebook page last month, Carmen in Tennessee said “we feel it is very wrong to tell us that we HAVE to be married in order to [live together with children, under a divorce decree]. We do not believe in marriage. I feel this clause has been ordered based on religious views which I absolutely do not believe in … never in my life have I felt my rights as an American citizen have been so meaningless.”

If you haven’t already spoken out against on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s outrageous statement that a landlord’s religious beliefs justify denying housing to an unmarried couple, do it now!

An update on housing, hospital visitation and health insurance.

AtMP is currently tracking three important measures:

1) S.3182 Equal Access to COBRA Act: a federal bill that would give same-sex partners, same and different-sex domestic partners, as well as qualified siblings, parents and grandparents the ability to purchase health insurance through COBRA.

2) H.R. 4820 The Fair and Inclusive Housing Rights Act : a federal bill that would prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

3) Presidential Memorandum on Hospital Visitation (4/15/10): an order to instruct hospitals that participate in Medicare or Medicaid to make

clear that designated visitors, including individuals designated by legally valid advance directives (such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies), should enjoy visitation privileges that are no more restrictive than those that immediate family members enjoy. [And] that participating hospitals may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

While AtMP really likes the COBRA bill, we believe the visitation and housing items should include the term, “marital status.” We’ll request this change in the visitation rule during the 60-day public comment period expected to start at the end of June. My conversations with Congressional staff suggest they will be open to adding “marital status” to the housing bill; however, that bill is not moving at the moment.

***PLEASE STAY TUNED FOR YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE ACTION!***

Data show marital status impact on health coverage but not health

My inner geek is having a great week (at the expense of my less robust inner fundraiser – please help me restore psychic harmony by making an easy, secure, tax-deductible donation to support this work)!

New data on the impact of Massachusetts’ 2006 health reform law demonstrates the link between women’s marital status and health coverage:

… roughly 60,000 women aged 18 to 64 were uninsured in fall 2009. Moreover, one in every five women reported problems obtaining care or paying for the care they needed. … The women who were uninsured … were disproportionately young (ages 18 to 25), Hispanic, and single.

My quick crunching of the new data on MA women produced some eye-opening numbers:

for every 100 women who are living with their unmarried partners and who have health insurance, there are 150 uninsured cohabiting women;
for every 100 ever-single women with health insurance, there are 223 uninsured ever-single women;
for every 100 divorced, separated, or widowed women who have all their health care needs taken care of, there are 135 divorced, separated, or widowed women with some unmet need for health care;
for every 100 cohabiting women who had no trouble finding a doctor, there are 137 cohabiting women who are having difficulty finding a doctor (or finding one who accepts their insurance or new patients). Thanks, Rachel, for checking my math!

This report reaffirms findings about both men and women which were released by the same research team late last year. Of course, coverage and access differentials correlate to numerous variables, but the difference between married and unmarried MA residents’ health care is so big that it keeps showing up in the reports’ opening lines.

I was bothered by the 2009 report’s implication that young single men preferred to be uninsured, so I checked in with Tom, an AtMP member who is an MD-MPH in Boston. He wisely said “I suspect that “never married’ is the least of the reasons that young men choose not to be insured. Un/underemployment, poverty, and feeling invulnerable are much more important reasons. “Never Married” most likely popped out of the data analysis software (which) will correlate everything unless you tell it not to.”

MA’s health reform legislation was an important model for national health reform, so everyone is watching MA’s results because they may predict what we’ll see nationwide. So far, it looks like the failure to create a single-payer system or to help everyone get equal access to coverage regardless of martial status will recreate the inequality we’ve been living with for years: unmarried people are more likely to lack access to affordable health care.

That stinks, not only because it’s unjust but also because it could fuel the next perennial wildfire of sloppy media reports claiming that ‘marriage makes you healthier.’ Luckily, a new study on people in the UK offers a big bucket of water to throw on that fire. In sum, it “finds that the effect of cohabitation on health is not statistically different from the effect of marriage….”

This study’s American authors tried to take into account the way peoples’ health changes over time, and to

disentangl[e] the selection effect (healthy people make better marriage partners, ceteris paribus) versus the so-called protective effect of marriage (married people are healthier because they have a spouse who can monitor their health behaviors, care for them when they are ill, and discourage them from engaging in risky behaviors, such as smoking and drinking). It is the latter effect that is of interest to economists as it represents the causal effect of marriage on health. …

The striking result is that once we control for both selection and health dynamics cohabitation and divorce are insignificantly different in their effect on health than marriage for all sub-samples. Never married is only weakly significantly worse for health and only for all women and women under age 40. … our results suggest that both males and females may gain comparable protective effects from cohabitation and the negative health effects of divorce found by some researchers may be overstated. …

Of course, don’t forget that they studied people who all enjoy equal access to the UK’s national health system – no Brit ever gets married to get health insurance! Interestingly, they found that income still affects health despite the national health system, partly because lower income people are exposed to more health hazards (low-quality food or housing, for example).

for every 100 divorced, separated, or widowed women who have all their health care needs taken care of, there are

135

divorced, separated, or widowed women with some unmet need for health care.

Big news on welfare-funded marriage programs: they don’t work

At last, a moment we’ve been waiting for! The release of a major evaluation of marriage programs funded by federal welfare dollars titled “Early Impacts from the Building Strong Families Project,” written by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. under a federal contract. Punch line: they don’t work.

The executive summary is very worth reading. They does not sugar-coat the dismal results, and I love the opening line: “Although most children raised by single parents fare well, …”

Our friend Shawn Fremsted at Center for Economic & Policy Research does a nice job of summarizing, concluding that the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative was a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated. Hear hear!

Rather than re-hash, I’ll add a comment on how the report’s detailed information about program operations speaks to the question of whether marriage programs should receive anti-poverty funds. I’m writing from the perspective of having spent 13 years working in low income neighborhoods around NYC, designing and running social service and housing programs for TANF* recipients and other community residents.

Mathematica reports that “Most BSF programs had little or no effect on relationships; however, there were two notable exceptions. The Oklahoma City program had a consistent pattern of positive effects, while the Baltimore program had a number of negative effects.” Oklahoma City was the only one using a relationship curriculum especially designed for low-income / low-literacy couples. Baltimore recruited couples with the lowest incomes and the lowest levels of commitment to each other or the program. Oklahoma City’s program was purpose-built; Baltimore’s was added to a pre-existing program “known for providing employment and fatherhood services to low-income men since 1999.” Although only 45% of participants in OK City graduated, that is five times higher than all the other programs.

There are many other distinctions, of course. But these few suggest that these marriage programs didn’t just fail, they failed to address the realities of people with very low incomes who could have been receiving more effective anti-poverty services if TANF funds hadn’t been diverted by marriage-happy politicians.

We eagerly await the release of more marriage program evaluations. To learn more about the upcoming evaluations, and what we hope to learn from them, turn to page 14 of Let Them Eat Wedding Rings.

Sign the petition to help us stop the federal government from throwing more good money after bad! If you are an expert on TANF and/or represent an organization that is working on TANF issues, join our professional coalition!

——-

*TANF = Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the primary federal welfare program.

Marital Status on the Supreme Court

There’s really nothing to say about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s marital status, or Justice Sotomayor’s, or Justice Souter’s, or anyone else’s. Marital status should not be a factor in any person’s employment application. Unfortunately, marital status discrimination in hiring is still allowed in much of the country, and, obviously, in the media.

I tried not to read any of the media flap about Kagan’s personal life. But, many AtMP members sent me links to Maureen Dowd’s column, so here it is in case you missed it. Personally, yuck! I’ve never been a Dowd fan. But I’m a big fan of Bella DePaulo, so I hope you’ll read her roundup of the media’s singlism and mothermania with regard to Kagan’s nomination.

Of much greater interest would be any serious legal analysis of whether Kagan thinks the Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional, or how she’d vote on a hypothetical challenge to an employer who provides domestic partner benefits but only to same-sex couples. Would she have decided, like Justice Alito, that spouses of persecuted refugees have greater rights than the refugees’ unmarried partners? Is she beholden to the marriage movement, like oft-mentioned potential nominee Judge Sears? Any legal scholars out there? Please?

Don’t over-romanticize romance

When former first lady Laura Bush said “I also know that when couples are committed to each other and love each other that they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has,” she was clearly speaking in the context of same-sex marriage. Wonder what she thinks about unmarried different-sex couples, or non-romantic caring relationships like siblings or friends?

A reminder not to over-romanticize romantic relationships (and not to over-focus on marriage) came in the form of horrible news about domestic and intimate-partner violence, particularly the murder of Yeardley Love at the University of Virginia. Coverage of this case revealed that “1 in 5 Virginia homicides resulted from intimate partner violence in 2005,” including “victims who had intervened or were caught in the crossfire of intimate partner violence,” and that “51% of all female homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner.” If that weren’t sad enough, protecting people from violence has a marital status discrimination angle. As Newsweek noted

despite [the boyfriend's] violent past, Love couldn’t have filed a restraining order against him even if she wanted to. Virginia is one of eight states that excludes people in dating relationships – in other words, unmarried couples or partners – from getting protective restraining orders.

Letter to editor: a resource for counseling unmarried couples

I’m writing because I read Amy Wood’s article on therapy with cohabiting couples this morning and wanted to let the AtMP community know that I have recently published a paper on this topic. I’ll paste in the citation below. I would be glad to email a copy of it to anyone who is interested.

Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2009). Working with cohabitation in relationship education and therapy. Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, 8, 95-112.

Sincerely,
Galena K. Rhoades, Ph.D.

Becoming an Adult Without Getting Married

When does a person become an adult? What is adulthood, and why does it matter? How have the answers to these questions changed over time, and what do the changes mean for American society? How should civic institutions respond?

These fascinating questions are the subject of Transition to Adulthood, the latest in a research series called The Future of Children published by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (my alma mater) and the Brookings Institution. This anthology of 10 essays does not answer all those questions. In fact, it doesn’t seem to recognize that some exist; but, it does provide valuable insight into demographic trends and policy responses.

Why review it here? Because, according to one of the authors,

Becoming an adult has traditionally been understood as comprising five core transitions – leaving home, completing school, entering the workforce, getting married, and having children.

However,

Today… only about half of Americans consider it necessary to marry or have children to be regarded as an adult.

The question begs so hard it practically jumps off the page: should marriage and parenthood still be understood as markers of adulthood by researchers and policy makers? Amazingly, none of the 19 authors in this anthology seem interested in changing their traditional understanding. For example, one lists women’s tendency “to delay marriage and parenthood” as a factor that has “helped to delay and complicate the passage to adulthood.” Even the use of “transition” (singular) in the book’s title suggests the authors’ devotion to the idea of one right way to become an adult, despite the rich diversity of reality which their data describe so well.

Equally amazing, none of the authors unpack the implied moral or normative value of adulthood; no one explains why it matters. Of course, I’d rather live in a country where my fellow adults act like adults, not like children. But my common sense definition of “acting like an adult” has little to do with the “five core transitions.” A book that recommends governmental and civic action towards a goal ought to justify why that goal is good for individuals and society. Instead, the closest it comes to explaining why adulthood matters is to describe the negative

consequences of the extended transition. … [F]irst … the growing burden placed on the middle- and lower-income families who were providing their children with schooling, housing, health insurance and income well beyond the age range of 18 – 21, the traditional age of majority. … [S]econd… the unexpected strain being imposed on key social institutions.

One thing the anthology does very well is highlight the different life patterns experienced by people of different gender, race/ethnicity, economic class and immigration history. For example, it cites one study of children of immigrants who (rather than becoming a long-term burden) provide regular or even total financial support to their parents, and another study finding that children of immigrants “differed in several ways from conventional American norms of departing the parental household and setting up a separate home.”

Another question begged: whose norms are “conventional?” A different essay mentions that “youth and parents from less-advantaged families continue to favor an earlier departure from the home than do those of more advantaged means.” Furthermore, “women are typically younger than men when they leave home because they complete college earlier, form cohabiting unions earlier, and marry about two years earlier, on average, than men.” However, “young mothers who do not enter a union before bearing a child typically remain in the parental home for several years and receive financial support and child care from their parents.”

What Transition to Adulthood does best is provide heaps of fascinating data. Here are just a few highlights about marriage and its alternatives: “About half of high school seniors say that they plan to cohabit as couples before they marry. … By age 34, 7 in 10 have tied the knot. … [T]he percentages of people who have never married, and who are intentionally childless, are higher now than at any other time in American history….”

Given this nation’s obsession with marriage and parenting – and our politicians’ willingness to legislate behavior – I was especially struck by the fact that, while there are many studies of people who are relatively rich or poor, “[r]esearchers know far less about the family formation patterns of young adults who grow up in families with modest resources.” Isn’t that the majority of us? I was also glad to see recognition that “young people who can build stronger and wider connections to adults other than parents (for example, teachers and adult mentors) also end up faring better than those who do not.” (emphasis in original)

With essays on education, labor, the military, civic engagement and “vulnerable populations,” as well as the immigration and family formation sections I’ve highlighted, Transition to Adulthood offers plenty of food for thought. I do hope that its target audience of “policy makers, practitioners and the media” will dig into the rich details and give more thought to what adulthood is, how people get there, and why it matters. Otherwise, we’ll end up with more legal carrots and sticks, more media hype, and less real help to build a society where we all can thrive.

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