engleski

Competing Policy Goals and the Taxation of Married Couples: A Study of Taxpayer Preferences

In a progressive tax system, it is impossble to simultaneously achieve the tax policy goals of marriage neutrality, where taxes are unaffected by marital status, and horizontal equity between married couples, where equal-income married couples are taxed equally. There have been many calls to eliminate the marriage penalty in the income tax law, implicitly assuming that marriage neutrality is preferred to horizontal equity between married couples. We elicited taxpayer preferences for competing policy goals from a sample of mostly middle and upper income taxpayers. Our results indicate that about two-thirds of our respondents have a preference for horizontal equity. This suggests that the implicit assumption that taxpayers are willing to sacrifice horizontal equity to achieve marriage neutrality may not be correct.

horizontal equity; marriage tax nautrality; marriage penalty

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