The Pittsburgh Press (July 11, 1941)
SEX-ANGLING TAXES
Another striking example of what Herbert Spencer called legislative momentum has developed in the joint-return federal income tax proposal.
Spencer said that few if any laws can confine their effects to the simple objective intended. In our generation, Prohibition, for instance. Designed to stop drinking, it ended up with wholesale and open defiance of the law itself, after bootlegging, racketeering, murder, civil-liberty violations, and a whole host of unforeseen consequences grew out of the “noble experiment.” Finally came repeal, by a disgusted and disillusioned nation.
We don’t mean by implication to out the joint-return idea in the same class with Prohibition. We merely cite it as another one of those things.
Designed to raise revenue – that was the simple objective. But it is already stirring up a moral as well as an economic ruckus. It is being called an assault on the marriage estate, an encouragement either to divorce or to “living in sin” to save the tax; a reversion from woman’s independent status acquired through long years of struggle for suffrage; a penalty on the individual initiative of women workers.
The National Woman’s Party is up in arms, declaring the proposal to be an effort to make a wife a chattel. Generally speaking, it has all aspects of that hell which “hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
The joint return would make it mandatory for man and wife to pool their incomes for federal tax purposes. When both are earning, this would run into bigger surtaxes and a payment otherwise much higher than if each was on a separate-return basis as in the past.
For example, suppose each were making $2,500 a year. Their payment would be raised 12% as against separate returns. At $5,000 each, 32%. At $10,000 each, 50%. And when all other contemplated hikes are included, as 1940 compares with 1941, it would mean a 180% increase for the $2,500 classification, 280% for the $5,000, and 212% for the $10,000.
All that is, of course, very statistical, but extremely important to those who pay. So not only a sex angle but also a large economic factor is involved.
It is not implying therefore that headlines like this in The New York Times are beginning to appear:
JOINT TAX RETURN MAY BE ABANDONED
One of the main reasons for abandonment no doubt would be found in the fact that the thrifty Congressman, if any, would be hit especially hard. Example:
Thrifty Congressman has $5,000 annual income, besides salary. Wife, through own effort, or by inheritance or gift, has another $5,000. Total $20,000, with Congressman’s salary.
Tax on 1940 income, $1,540 on separate-return basis. Tax on 1941 income, separate returns, $3,190; on proposed joint return, $4,356. Total increase, $2,816 or 182%.
Of course all that would not influence a Congressman’s vote or rob him of his objectivity as one who levies taxes, but it would cause him, as the saying goes, to “reconsider.”