Scholars of family law, taxation, economics, history and gender studies will be interested in a forthcoming book by Dennis J. Ventry, Jr., a rising star who joins the faculty at American University Washington College of Law this Fall. Ventry’s manuscript, For Richer, For Poorer: How Tax Policymakers Have Protected and Punished American Families, 1913-2006, is currently under review with several publishers and stands to make a substantial contribution to the field. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
In 1975, law professor Boris Bittker queried how family taxation in the United States might change due to rapidly evolving social and economic demographics. How would the tax system fare, Bittker wondered,”in the maelstrom of changing social attitudes toward marriage, women’s rights, two-job couples, communal living patterns, birth control, population growth, and intrafamily rights and liabilities.”The tax system fared just fine. The revolution in social mores that Bittker perceived failed to alter the tax treatment of the family. As in 1975, taxing the family in 2006 reflects the social and economic realities of mid-twentieth century America.
Policymakers in the middle of the 20th century created a tax system that reflected the interests of married, male-breadwinner families, and that conflicted with the interests of alternative family forms. Sixty years later, we operate under essentially the same tax system, but our social and economic norms are very different. When you impose the antiquated structure on modern economic arrangements within families, multiple family forms, and prevailing gender norms you get serious inequities. Thus, in 2006, the U.S. tax system bestows huge”marriage bonuses”on traditional families, while imposing”marriage penalties”on non-traditional families, work disincentives on secondary earners, and tax penalties on cohabiting singles, who either choose not to marry or are prohibited from marrying by virtue of state and federal law.
This book examines the history of the federal income tax, from 1913 to the present, paying particularly close attention to the tax treatment of married vs. single taxpayers, single-earner vs. dual-earner families, men vs. women, and opposite-sex vs. same-sex couples. It describes policy continuity in the face of massive social and economic change. In the process, it conveys three main points: (1) tax policies in the United States have always distorted labor demographics, social mobility, intra-family economics, and family formation; (2) the distortions were created and preserved by policymakers (predominantly men) who viewed the tax system as a tool for achieving explicit social and economic goals; and (3) while the traditional family norm has emerged as a peculiar anachronism among a spectrum of modern American family norms, the antediluvian tax system continues to protect traditional families while punishing non-traditional families.
The manuscript’s Table of Contents, Introductory Chapter, Reference List and Appendix are available here.
-Posted by Bridget Crawford
