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Abstract: Joint tax filing for married couples raises personal and politically charged questions about the nature of family and marriage. The U.S. tax system adopted joint tax filing in response to an idiosyncrasy of U.S. federalism: property rights in marriage vary by state. However, the United States' approach to joint filing, as observed over forty years ago, “is ... characterized by an arbitrary system of incentives and disincentives for marriage that are determined by a couple's income and the proportions in which that income is earned by each spouse.”
Indeed, the United States is an outlier in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on account of joint filing, and academic criticism of joint filing has accumulated. In 1993, Marjorie Kornhauser challenged joint filing's reliance on the marital “partnership model,” conducting a survey that asked couples about their resource-pooling behavior. Subsequent research has shown that the United States' approach to joint filing has benefited unequal-earning married couples more than equal-earners, men more than women, and white households more than black households. Recently, economists have shown that an optimally designed income tax system would feature taxes based on individual earnings, not family earnings.
Where do self-identified tax experts stand? To what extent have academic critiques of joint filing permeated the expert tax community more broadly? To start understanding the answers to these questions, we asked a group of experts about their joint filing experiences and attitudes.
Our fifty-eight respondents overwhelmingly had personal experience with joint filing and were largely white and Democratic Party/independent-identified. Most reported pooling income with their spouse (83%) and agreed that joint filing reflected the economic reality of their marriage (84%). However, when asked how they would design a tax system from scratch (i.e., offer joint filing or require individual filing), respondents were sharply divided and often ambivalent. Individual filing was preferred by 38%, joint filing by 34%, and 21% selected “other” or “don't know.” Comments suggested that, among those who preferred joint filing, respondents identified tradeoffs involved, thereby conveying some critical awareness. And, among the 72% of the sample that identified as tax law academics, by whom most of the criticism of joint filing has been published, support for individual filing was highest (45%).
While our small sample had significant shortcomings, our results suggest that those in the homogeneous (white, liberal/independent, usually male) world of academic tax experts do acknowledge critiques of joint filing, but their experiences may not align with the critiques.
This Essay proceeds in five parts. Part II describes the survey. Part III presents demographic information about our respondents. Parts IV and V analyze the responses, and Part VI concludes with suggestions for future scholarship.
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