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Taxation-Federal

2006

Marriage

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Love Doesn't Pay: The Fiction Of Marriage Rights In The Workplace, James A. Sonne Mar 2006

Love Doesn't Pay: The Fiction Of Marriage Rights In The Workplace, James A. Sonne

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.


A New I Do: Towards A Marriage-Neutral Income Tax, Shari Motro Jan 2006

A New I Do: Towards A Marriage-Neutral Income Tax, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

The federal income tax system treats married couples as if each spouse earned approximately one-half of the couple's combined income through a mechanism called "income splitting. " For many one-earner and unequal-earner couples, income splitting produces a significant advantage, a "marriage bonus," by shifting income from higher to lower rate brackets. Marriage-based income splitting relies on a presumption that marriage is a good indicator of economic unity between two taxpayers. It is not. Marriage does not require spousal sharing, and many unmarried couples share everything they earn. As a result, the current system extends the benefit of income splitting to …