Composing taxes, you may have noticed that many details of your personal life change how much you pay. Are you married? Do you have children? Do you pay for children care or one parent stays at home?

These details and their accompanying policies are, basically, the response of the Tax Law to “Mom’s Mom’s Wars” between work mothers and their colleagues at home, providing at least a little bit of something to everyone: better tax brackets for that. It can be difficult for each taxpayer to understand what he owes – and even more difficult to worry, the citizen is to understand how all this adds up in society and what kind of family types get the most favorable treatment.

In a April 2024 report. For the Manhattan Institute, I shot adding. I have written a computer program that simulates that different types of families are taxed during my life. With admittedly generous simplifying assumptions (such as these couples live all their lives at 2022, Ground floor day-Style), illustrates that tax loads change with marital status, children and income.

My discoveries suggest that the status quo is particularly friendly to the traditional – without so many common – food holders and housewife, and especially negligible towards couples with children where both partners earn similar revenues.

Why do single people pay taxes the most?

Take someone who earns a medium salary for a full -time worker for each age from 23 to 65, which is about $ 55,000 a year. As an individual individual, he will pay about $ 200,000 in income tax during his life. But if they add a spouse who does not work, it falls to $ 125,000. This is sometimes called the “feeder bonus” – and this happens because they are tax carriers for married couples (except very rich) twice as high as a single carrier.

This same feature of the tax law implies that when two people with equal revenues get married, at least they will not be punished, because their tax thresholds double with their combined income. This applies to single individuals, but not for single parents.

Single parents lose the status of a major home if they get married and can also lose income tax, whose thresholds do not double with marriage. Two adults with revenue in the lower 25 percentage and two children, whose combined income is an average of about $ 65,000, give a dramatic example: they pay about 100,000 USD income tax if they are in marriage and only 30,000 USD if not.

Ultimately, the tax law does a good thing. This reduces the tax for people with lower incomes through progressive rates, for parents in general through tax loans for children and for the elderly, excluding a lot of income from taxes from taxation. But although couples with a feeder and single parents benefit from further assistance, double employees with children are often treated worse than unmarried.

There are many ideas to deal with these bias. Some suggested Giving secondary recipients a special tax relief. Others, especially on the left, have long discussed aggressively subsidizing children’s care (although it subsidizes the double earnings and single parents – founding anyone without a spouse or other family member who is available to watch children).

My idea, however, is this: tax people as individuals, not their joint income, as many other countries do, which would be up to the long-term increase in women’s work and pay- uses now About half of Americans. Enable the spouse with higher earnings to use the head status of the home head if children or adults who are not able to work are present in the picture.

This would mean increasing taxes for couples with a feeder and tax relief for double -earning pairs. But to be clear, I do not suggest this out of the desire to shape other people’s behavior or hostility to Hreadwinner’s households: I even spent time as a dad who stay home, even though I still worked part -time. I say this because that change would be in the current system in the current system.

Robert Verbruggen is a guy at the Manhattan Institute.

Version of this story originally published on Fortune.com April 15, 2024.

More about taxes:

• Good news for Americans with ‘Tax Intament’ – The average refund goes up 7.5%
• Only 9 countries Still tax food And with egg prices that rise several attempts to leave the club
• One of five taxpayers who fulfill the conditions miss out on the opportunity Take EITC Tax Credit

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