So says Phyliss Schlafly, who thinks Texas Gov. Rick Perry's flat tax plan flattens the traditional family and rewards kinky couples, here:
The joint income tax return for husbands and wives was landmark legislation. The Republican Congress passed it in 1948 over President Truman's veto.
As originally designed, the joint return recognized a husband and wife as two equal partners, even if the husband earned all the family's income. Each tax bracket, deduction and exemption was equal to twice that of a single person.
Subsequent tax reform bills, especially the one signed by Richard Nixon in 1969, which also introduced the hated Alternative Minimum Tax, reduced the value of a joint return to only about 1.6 persons, while increasing the tax benefit of an unmarried "head of household" to about 1.4 persons. Simple arithmetic shows that a single parent with an unmarried live-in "partner" gets more favorable tax treatment than respectable married couples struggling to support their own children.
And by the way, the postwar "baby boom" happened during the 20-year period when married couples were fairly valued in the federal income tax. That's not coincidence; incentives matter, and America's marriage rate and birth rate plummeted after the value of the joint return was reduced.
