Audio for this story from All Things Considered will be available at approximately 7:00 p.m. ET.
TranscriptWomen today are nearly half the workforce, and two-income couples are the norm. But the U.S. tax code? It's straight out of Ozzie and Harriet.
When it comes to paying taxes, economists say a lot of secondary wage-earners are getting a raw deal. It's called the marriage penalty.
"The system was never designed to penalize working spouses," says Melissa Kearney, director of the Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution. "It was just designed in a different era."
That era was 1948, when the U.S. began pooling the income of husbands and wives, Kearney says. It works great if one spouse stays home. A couple can drop to a lower tax bracket for a marriage bonus
View the Original article
