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I'm confused, in what way has the government deincentivized/roadblocked marriage?


There are strong incentives in higher income brackets for tax purposes and such. In the lower/minimum wage sphere, marriage can have the opposite effect. You can loose access to various government programs such as food stamps because suddenly your family income counts. I've heard that support for single parents and low earning single parents has been increased in recent decades, which has led to lower rates of marriage and subsequent erosions to the general fabric in that socioeconomic sphere.



Even the article admits the data contained therein is more an interesting point than an actual decision criteria for anyone getting married:

>Few couples base their marriage decisions on the tax consequences that may result.

I'm willing to bet the number of 20-somethings that have "tax considerations" deciding their marital status can be measured in basis points. Furthermore, nothing I see there is a "new penalty", while the numbers have varied over time, those rules look to be exactly the same as they were 20 years ago.


First, this has been around for a long time. So it has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is recently less people getting married.

Second, you are nuts if you think this has ANY significant impact on people getting married.

Third, you can file married filed separately.. so while I'm not up on all the details of that, you can probably avoid the simple impacts it might have.

Anyway, that is an extremely crazy weak argument.


This penalty basically starts at 250k in combined income. The median household income is $60,700 as of 2018.


Sure doesn't. My wife and I made the same amount of money, within 1% of each other, when we got married. We both changed out deduction from single to married. Tax bill came around and we owed 10k.

Our income at the time, combined, was ~160k.


The loss of EITC affects low incomes.

The mortgage deduction affects anyone with a "large" mortgage, but at current housing prices "large" is becoming the norm.


So a few things the government does is favor oneside in divorce and family courts. They will give housing and money through programs to keep people single via section 8 and foodstamps programs. They incentivize single motherhood by allow fathers to be replaced by government checks.

All these things whether good or bad makes it less likely people settle for pairing together like they typically would have.


To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion about this, and I'm not making a claim that marriage is a good or a bad thing, I'm just answering your question.

The usual argument that says that the government disincentivized marriage is through social safety nets like welfare, particularly ones that pay more for single parents without a spouse in the house, as well as mechanisms like child support payments.

The usual argument that says society has disincentivized marriage is basically through access to sex. There used to be a culture of enforced monogamy, where there was enormous social pressure to be married before having sex, and especially before living with one another. Now, that stigma is largely gone, so the incentive to get married has diminished substantially.

Again, not making a value judgement, just answering the question.


Wait, marriage is disincentived because government is not forcing people to stay in it?


I'm not sure you read my comment, and if you did, you certainly didn't understand it.




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