Should We Tax Divorce?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Marriage on Monday, July 12, 2010 9:59 AM
They finally got the murderous Al Capone on a charge of tax evasion.
Members of Parliament ended the British slave trade with an obscure shipping regulation.
In law and politics, sometimes you have to take the indirect route.
Therefore I’m intrigued by this genius idea.
Why not tax divorce?
It’s an idea that respects a basic economic principle: “what you subsidize you get more of; what you tax you get less of.”
Moreover, in a small but significant way, it would put the law on the side of marriage.
On the heels of recent news that divorce may be “contagious,” Author Ed West makes the case for such a policy in a liberal democracy:
It’s not the job of legislators to moralise, any more than it’s the job of churchmen to run the economy but it is their job to make laws and tax systems that subtly encourage people to behave in a way that is better for them and for other people. This is not about standing in judgment on every single family but about encouraging the models that have the best average outcomes. Many divorced couples are better parents and better friends than people in unhappy marriages, of course, but many a 20-a-day smoker has outlived a clean-living fitness fanatic.
If divorce is contagious, then it changes the way we should look at something regarded as a fundamental right. Very few people would advocate banning divorce – and I’m certainly not one of then – and probably not many more would even advocate reversing the easy divorce laws of the 1960s. But perhaps we should consider taxing it instead - so that the state gets five or 10 per cent of a couple’s total assets when they split, at least for couples who are worth a certain amount.
I’m not sure he’s serious, but it makes as much sense as other so-called “sin taxes, no? And in a field in which the state has a genuine interest, because society needs stable families in order to remain free.
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