Why Does The Tax Code Favor The Married?

Tax season has arrived with snowstorms and the dreaded Sunday drivers sent by dark forces to navigate the frozen streets, making me happy that I'm a pedestrian and a passenger. A vehicle-free life opens a person to sights and sounds and smells which the windowed carriage cannot provide. Driving is a dehumanizing experience, and sometimes the gas pedal gets stuck and the brakes fail.



Walking and riding the bus is meditative, and during this joyous season of filing and obtuse tax code gymnastics I have had time to think about a certain tax policy that seems unfair to me: Why do married people get tax breaks for simply finding another taxpayer to spend their lives with, and why does each child a person has enrich the pot?



Sometimes unfair policy is so ingrained that we seem to take it for granted, and this is a fine example of such a policy. People just accept these tax breaks, especially the married and aggressively child-bearing, for obvious financial reasons. The great tax god smiles upon the committed monogamist and the prolific.



My small voice in the darkness screams this: Why don't I, a single gentleman with no children, get some tax break for keeping future Social Security recipients at bay with an aggressive use of prophylactics whenever I have that certain twinkle in my eye? After all, I'm not affecting the bloated entitlement system in a negative way; my lack of enthusiasm for seeing my own offspring to fruition is keeping the population at bay in some small way. You, taxpayer, will never have to pay for children who don't exist, subsidizing lives that were brought about through no choice of your own.



One can understand how a single mother may benefit from tax breaks for her children, and what's left of our understanding of the social contract may lead us to accept this policy without question. However, I had a conversation recently with a single mother, five weeks after her second child was born, outside of the affordable and excellent sushi joint named Dancing Wasabi (I caught a ride). She mentioned a $10,000 tax refund based on the simple existence of her children. She mentioned a new Jeep. She mentioned the new and exciting Apple invention known as IPad. She did not mention the extensive training her children would be receiving to operate these complicated devices.



The point is, are people really using these bloated tax refunds to support their children? I'm sure some are, meanwhile others are wallowing in the manure laid by the great cash cow. I've heard many tales of child custody acrobatics performed to maximize the flow of tax money from my single, childless pockets to their surely healthy and happy families. I object to this, but this argument presented to said single mother could lead much shrieking and gnashing of teeth, so I just sighed and smoked and looked around the square while waiting to be let inside to eat raw fish that I could have more easily afforded with a robust refund.



The tax code may always provide for these children then, but what of a tax incentive for simply becoming married? It is basically unreasonable on principle alone, not to mention the fact that because most marriages end in divorce, marriage itself is simply another on the long list of failed government programs.



Sometimes there is something to be said for being a non-participant. I don't dump children into a society which is then billed for my meandering child's transgressions, lack of spirit, or embarrassingly long rap sheet. I don't disappoint my family by appearing a drunken waste in a chapel to hitch to the blurry figure to my right. I don't even drive, and yet I get nothing in return for leaving virtually no carbon footprint. My life as it relates to society is a study in the virtues of addition by subtraction, and for this all I ask is the following: Let's give the kid a break.