Shari Motro (Richmond) has published an op-ed in today’s New York Times, The IRS’s Shotgun Marriage:

Because marriage is a lousy proxy for economic unity, joint filing—with its income-splitting benefits and joint-liability burdens—shouldn’t be available to couples who lead independent financial lives. Rather, only couples who are prepared to marry their wallets as well as their hearts by signing an income-sharing agreement should be permitted to file as one….

The op-ed is based on Shari’s forthcoming article, A New I Do: Towards a Marriage-Neutral Income Tax, 91 Iowa L. Rev. ___ (2006).  Here is the abstract:

The federal income tax system treats married couples as if each spouse earned approximately one-half of the couple’s combined income through a mechanism called "income splitting." For many one-earner and unequal-earner couples, income splitting produces a significant advantage, a "marriage bonus," by shifting income from higher to lower rate brackets. Marriage-based income splitting relies on a presumption that marriage is a good indicator of economic unity between two taxpayers. It is not. Marriage does not require spousal sharing and many unmarried couples share everything they earn. As a result, the current system extends the benefit of income splitting to some taxpayers who do not deserve it while withholding it from others who do. Because marriage is a poor proxy for economic unity, this Article proposes a new eligibility criterion for income-splitting: only couples legally committed to sharing their income, regardless of marital status, would be permitted to file jointly.