“Here’s how the joint filing trap works: Under our tax system, higher incomes face higher marginal rates, meaning a couple’s combined income can push them into a higher tax bracket than if they filed separately. A married woman’s earnings, assuming she earns less than her husband, is taxed at the higher rate determined by her husband’s income. Joint filing essentially “stacks” her earnings on top of his for tax purposes.
To give a more concrete, albeit simplified, example: let’s say a woman, Kate, who earns $100,000, marries Jack, who earns $200,000, and they decide to file jointly. Together, their combined income of $300,000 would fall into the 24 percent tax bracket for joint filers. If Kate had filed individually, she would have been taxed in the 22 percent tax bracket, while Jack’s $200,000 would push him into the 32 percent bracket. Put simply, Kate’s earnings are taxed more when she jointly files with Jack.
Though married couples in the US have the option of filing separately, fewer than 7 percent actually do, as that almost always subjects their household to higher taxes than joint filing, in addition to causing them to lose other benefits.
These tax dynamics shape women’s behavior. Early in their careers, married young women often decide it makes more sense to quit working or go part-time, so their family can save on child care and pay less in tax.
Recent economic research has concluded that eliminating joint filing in the US would significantly increase married women’s workforce participation throughout their whole life.”
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“America stands increasingly alone in maintaining this system. In the decades after World War II, most countries copied America’s joint filing approach, but by the 1970s and 1980s — both to advance gender equality and to boost overall employment — nearly all OECD countries reverted back to individual tax filing systems.
The empirical evidence from these reforms is remarkable: Sweden, which abandoned its joint filing system in 1971, saw significant increases in married women’s employment, as did Canada, which shifted to individual taxation in 1988. In a telling contrast, when the Czech Republic bucked the international trend and introduced joint taxation in 2005, the number of married women in the workforce went down.”
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“The US system is particularly entrenched because health care and retirement systems have evolved for decades around joint family benefits. Married couples who file jointly, for example, typically qualify for lower health insurance premiums and more comprehensive coverage than those who file separately. Similarly, filing jointly gives married couples greater access to their spouse’s Social Security benefits.
Past decisions around work and family — including career gaps that erode skills and networks — have also created sticky “lock-in” effects that would be difficult for millions of couples to reverse, even if Congress abandoned joint filing tomorrow.
Still, more targeted reforms might work. During the Reagan administration, Congress briefly implemented a tax deduction for secondary earners, essentially reducing the tax penalty on wives by allowing couples to deduct 10 percent of the lower-earning spouse’s income, up to $3,000. Some economists have proposed bringing this idea back.
Michael Graetz, a tax professor emeritus at Columbia and Yale law schools, advocates both reinstating the secondary earner deduction and expanding child care subsidies. These changes would help protect secondary earners at a crucial career juncture, when child-rearing responsibilities often force women to reduce their working hours for financial reasons.
Tax policy might not be the first thing on the agenda for most feminist activists, but the case for rethinking joint filing is strong. As De Nardi’s research demonstrates, joint filing still poses a major barrier to women’s participation in the workforce, even for younger and more educated women.
“Over time, political inertia and the complexity of reforming entrenched tax systems have likely contributed to its persistence,” she said. “Policymakers and the public may also underestimate the long-term costs.””
“only 121 of those 293 B.T. (Before Trump) Republican legislators (41 percent) still have an office on Capitol Hill.
Some of this, of course, is normal attrition. Nineteen of the Republicans who left Congress did so to seek another office, something House members do all the time. Thirty lost a general election, indicating they didn’t want to leave Congress. Some of the 70 who retired from elected office, such as 82-year-old former Rep. Kay Granger, probably did so for age or health reasons rather than political ones. There were even four Republican members of Congress who died in office.
But some undeniably left because they no longer fit in in Trump’s GOP. Most obviously, 10 lost a primary election to a fellow Republican, including former Reps. Liz Cheney, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Tom Rice, who all faced a Trump-backed primary challenger after voting to impeach him in 2021. Several others, like Trump critics former Sen. Jeff Flake and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, likely chose not to run for reelection because they were worried they would meet the same fate. Other departed Republicans, like former Sen. Rob Portman, former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Rep. Ken Buck, expressed frustration with the direction of their party on their way out the door. Two, former Reps. Justin Amash and Paul Mitchell, even left the Republican Party before retiring from Congress.”
“What happens when one of the world’s largest repositories of free information becomes unreliable?
That dire situation came to pass in late January, when many federal websites took down entire datasets to avoid possibly violating a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump. At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-directed task force that is slashing government operations, has canceled contracts for the collection of data and cut workers who analyze and evaluate information about various facets of American life, such as education, housing and consumer protection. These developments led to widespread concern that some data that researchers have long relied on the government to collect would no longer be readily available, potentially hindering various initiatives meant to help Americans — both inside and outside of government.
Although some information has come back online, the availability and transparency of government-collected data is suddenly no longer a given. This isn’t a worry just for data journalists like us, either. Experts I spoke with laid out how the public and private sector, companies large and small, and even the average person use government data to make decisions about program effectiveness, business prospects and life choices. With this in mind, I delved into this recent interruption in data access, why this data has significant value and what challenges may lie ahead if government data becomes less accessible and reliable moving forward.”
“the way we think about how China would overrun Taiwan may well be wrong. Rather than an all-out invasion, it could attempt to capture the island without firing a single shot through “gray zone” tactics. Such tactics might combine maritime blockades and advanced cyberwarfare capable of cutting off Taiwan from the lines of seaborne trade and the digital access it needs to survive. And Beijing could do so in a way that might be just far enough below the threshold of conflict that would drive Washington and its allies to come to Taiwan’s aid.”
“More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.”
“The economic uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff threats has already warped markets and harmed the economy in ways large and small.”
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“Uncertainty created by Trump’s trade policies reduced aggregate U.S. investment by as much as $47 billion in 2018, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of Monetary Economics.
The authors of that paper wrote that “all measures suggest that uncertainty about trade policy has recently shot up to levels not seen since the 1970s.” They concluded that “both higher expected tariffs and increased uncertainty about future tariffs deters investment.””
“These tariffs will protect American steelmakers and aluminum manufacturers from competition but at the expense of other American manufacturers that buy steel and aluminum to produce finished goods.
Unfortunately, there are a lot more jobs in the latter camp than in the former.”
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“The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the costs of Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs totaled about $650,000 per job created. If this is an economic development scheme for American manufacturing, it’s a pretty terrible one.
Farther downstream, consumers will be hurt too. When Trump hiked tariffs on steel and aluminum imports during his first term, those import duties translated into price increases of 2.4 percent for steel and 1.6 percent for aluminum, according to a 2023 study by the U.S. International Trade Commission.
That might not sound like a lot, but there are several reasons to expect a more significant hit this time around.
For one, Trump is now raising tariffs on both metals to 25 percent. His first-term tariffs were 25 percent on steel but only 10 percent on aluminum.
The impact of the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term was also blunted by the wide variety of carve-outs and loopholes that the administration created. Companies affected by the tariffs could apply for exemptions—and the process for deciding who got those breaks was, unsurprisingly, opaque and political.”
“The U.S. is the second-largest steel importer in the world, according to the International Trade Administration. In 2023, the U.S. imported 25.6 million metric tons of steel and exported a little more than 8.2 million metric tons. About half of the aluminum used domestically is imported and by global standards, the U.S. has a very small aluminum smelting industry. Steel and aluminum imports to the U.S. were valued at nearly $50 billion in 2024, per Bloomberg.”
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“Imposing levies on steel and aluminum will increase costs for domestic energy projects (which will be passed on to consumers) while hamstringing America’s energy dominance. In recent years, high material costs (and burdensome regulations) have led to cancellations or price tag hikes for offshore wind energy, advanced nuclear power, and transmission line projects. Instead of building oil pipelines to the U.S., these trade barriers could also incentivize Canadian energy companies to invest in other markets, such as Japan, says Wayne Winegarden, an economist at the Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank. “This really is one of the dumbest things we could be doing,” Winegarden tells Reason.
Importantly, these tariffs won’t accomplish Trump’s stated goal of “making America rich again.”
A study from the International Trade Commission found tariffs on steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent) implemented during the first Trump administration decreased production and increased costs in downstream industries that use these materials by 0.6 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively. Total production in downstream industries was $3.5 billion less in 2021 because of these tariffs. The Tax Foundation estimates that repealing tariffs and their quotas would increase long-run gross domestic product by $3.5 billion and create thousands of jobs.”
““Victory” cologne and perfume. “Crypto President” watches. Limited-edition “American Eagle” guitars. T-branded golf shoes and “Fight Fight Fight” high-top sneakers.
These are just a sample of the many products licensed to bear President-elect Donald Trump’s brand, including some that he has promoted on his social media site Truth Social just weeks before his inauguration. If he continues to hawk his merchandise after returning to the White House, that could raise ethical concerns.
Consumer goods may be the least of Trump’s issues, however. He has a number of business ventures — including his social media platform, a nascent crypto firm, and the Trump Organization’s partnerships in the Middle East — that could present conflicts of interest, make the presidency vulnerable to foreign influence, and violate federal law.”