The (Federal) Benefits of Marriage

Reviewing Tim Carney’s new book Family Unfriendly, Robert VerBruggen cautions against going too far with aid to stay-at-home parents: “U.S. tax and entitlement policy is already quite favorable to breadwinner households — who generally receive a “marriage bonus” from the income-tax system and extra Social Security benefits to support the non-working spouse — and further reforms should bear these existing features in mind.”

We should bear those benefits in mind, definitely. But we also shouldn’t overstate them — and it won’t surprise VerBruggen, who knows these arguments inside and out, that I take a different perspective.

The “marriage bonus” he’s talking about is the tax code’s partial recognition of the fact that marriage is (in part) an economic partnership. Follow his link: The breadwinner couple in his example, where the husband makes four times as much as the wife, pays less in taxes than they would as separate tax filers. They get a “bonus” from being married rather than singles.

But they pay the same taxes as a couple in which the husband and wife have equal incomes that add up to the same total. The tax code in his example is, in other words, neutral between couples with the same total income. It doesn’t change a household’s tax liability based on the distribution of income within it. I think it makes more sense to view this as refraining from penalizing breadwinner couples rather than giving them a benefit.

The right comparison case for the breadwinner family isn’t a single woman making very little income and a single man making a lot more: Presumably, the reason she is making a lot less is that they’re married and she is doing more of her work inside the home.

As for those extra Social Security benefits for non-working spouses: They definitely exist. But Social Security and Medicare are a better deal for a childless couple than for a couple with a child, and a better deal for a couple with a child than a couple with two children. They amount, in that way, to a large implicit tax on raising children. Couples with one breadwinner and one stay-at-home parent tend to have larger-than-average families. So the program ends up being a great deal for a highly unusual couple: a couple with one spouse who is mostly out of the paid labor force but ends up raising one or no children.

All that said, it is certainly imaginable in theory that we could some day have government policies that distributed benefits and burdens in a way that was too generous to stay-at-home parents. We’re a very long way from there now.