Putting taxes together, you may have noticed that many details about your personal life change how much you pay. Are you married? Do you have children? Do you pay for child care or does one parent stay at home?

These details and their accompanying policies are, in essence, the response to the “Mom’s Wars” tax code among mothers working and their home colleagues, provide at least a little bit: better tax brackets for this, credit for that. It can be difficult for an individual taxpayer to find out what they owe – and even harder for the citizen to find out how it is added to society and what types of families receive the most favorable treatment.

In a Report for April 2024 For the Institute of Manhattan, I shot to add it. I wrote a computer program that simulates how different types of families are taxed throughout life. With recognizable simpler assumption (such as these couples live all their lives in 2022, Day on the ground-Cil), illustrates how tax burdens with marital status, children and income change.

My discoveries suggest that the status quo is particularly friendly to traditional – still no more common – households with a food and housewife manufacturer, and especially neglecting couples with children in which both partners earn similar income.

Why do single people pay the most in taxes?

Take someone who earns a full -time medium -sized salary for every age of 23 to 65, which averages about $ 55,000 a year. As the only individual, they will pay about $ 200,000 in income taxes throughout their lives. But if they add a spouse that doesn’t work, it falls up to $ 125,000. This is sometimes referred to as “cereal bonus” – and this is because the tax brackets for the couples are (except very rich) twice the largest than the singles brackets.

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

Single parents lose the status of a household head if they marry, and can also lose their earnings earnings, the stage thresholds that do not double the marriage. Two adults with the lower 25th percent and two children, whose combined revenue on average around $ 65,000, set a dramatic example: they pay about $ 100,000 in taxes on life, if they are married, and only $ 30,000 if not.

After all, the tax code does a few things well. It reduces taxes for lower -income people at progressive rates, for parents in general through a tax on children’s tax and the elderly by excluding a lot of social security income from taxation. But while couples with a resident of food and single parents benefit from further help, double earners with children are often treated worse than if they were unmarried.

There are many ideas for solving these bias. Some suggested Giving secondary earners a special tax break. Others, especially on the left, have long argued in favor of aggressive subsidizing children’s care (although this subsidizes both double earners and single parents – basically anyone without a spouse or other family member available for children).

My idea, however, is this: tax people as individuals rather than their common income, as many other countries do, and who-gratitude to the long-term rise in women’s work and salaries could now benefit About half of Americans. Allow the spouse to use the status of the household head if children or adult cannot work are present in the picture.

This would mean increasing pairs taxes with a resident of food and a tax break for double earnings with children. But to be clear, I do not suggest this for the desire to shape the behavior or hostility of others to the households of a food producer: I even spent time as a father staying at home, even though I was still working part -time. I say it because this change will address the unjustness in the current system.

Robert Verbruggan is an associate at the Manhattan Institute.

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

More about taxes:

• Good news for Americans with “Tax Scare” – Average recovery is increasing 7.5%
• Only 9 countries Still tax foods And with the prices of eggs rising a few try to leave the club
• One of five qualified taxpayers miss the possibility of Get Tax Credit EITC

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