The New York Sun has been editorializing that Obama’s tax hikes would be bad for women—indeed, that they constitute a “war on women.” In some cases, married people face a higher tax rate than two single people with the same combined income. Under Obama’s plan, the difference in tax rates would get bigger. The Sun argues that this would discourage women from staying in the paid workforce. “If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children.”

I think the Sun’s analysis has gone astray. For the purpose of this type of economic analysis, married couples should be regarded as a unit and not as two people who happen to share a mailing address. Obama’s tax plan is bad news for upper-income couples whether they have one paycheck or two. If a wife stays at home and the husband makes $220,000, that couple should not be treated worse than a husband and wife who each make $110,000. Obama’s plan makes that “homemaker penalty” worse, too, but the Sun ignores it to stay within a narrow feminist frame.

Sometimes the Sun’s logic is hard to follow. Take this passage from its latest editorial.

[I]n the same discourse that got Mr. Summers in so much trouble back in 2005, he reported on a colleague who had told him that of 22 women in a section of the Harvard Business School class that graduated in 1994, “there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point.”

On Thursday, Mr. Summers blithely assured questioners on behalf of the Obama campaign, “The idea that a return to the tax policies of the 1990s would harm the economy is supported by neither theory nor evidence nor the longer-term history.” Does it not harm the economy to usher 86% of Harvard Business School women graduates out of the full time workforce?

Did Summers say it was taxes that drove the remaining 19 women out of full-time paid employment? Does his comment suggest that Obama’s tax plan would have the same effect? Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but I don’t see how this attack makes any sense.