Married, with taxes

No one ever lost an election running against the tax man. Not content with a sure thing, political opportunists in Congress now want apple pie and motherhood as running mates.

It’s hard enough watching Republicans and Democrats outdo each other with the anti-IRS rhetoric. After all, Congress failed repeatedly in its duty to ride herd on the agency. And Congress created the real culprit — a tax code that’s bigger, dumber and meaner than an NFL lineman on double steroids.

The only thing more hypocritical would be congressional outrage at the so-called marriage tax. So guess what has the Capitol in high dudgeon?

There is, in fact, a marriage tax. Middle-income couples who make roughly the same incomes pay more than they would as singles. But there’s also a marriage bonus. The wider the difference between what the husband and wife earn, the more they save as joint filers. It has to do with progressive tax rates and the fact that the standard deduction and personal exemptions for a couple are less than double what they are for singles. The Congressional Budget Office says 42 percent of joint filers last year paid an average marriage penalty of $1,400, while 51 percent got an average bonus of $1,300.

But the marriage tax is not deliberate. It is not, as some Republicans say, part of a liberal plot to destroy the family. Nor is it, in the Democratic version, the result of the GOP favoring Big Business over wedded bliss. It’s just what happens when Congress uses the already bloated tax code to reward its special-interest friends. Somebody else picks up the tab and that usually is the large, faceless, unorganized mass in the middle. And so it will be until all the Mr. and Mrs. Does with 2.4 kids form their own PAC.

Here’s how insincere Congress is about the marriage tax. The recent bluster started up this summer, just as Congress was passing the tax bill — the same tax bill that penalized married couples who participate in new retirement and education savings accounts.

The proposed solutions — adjusting tax brackets, restoring a tax deduction for the lower-paid spouse, allowing couples to decide whether to file jointly or singly — all have one major drawback. They cost money.

The marriage tax is unfair — unfair because the patched up, mended, spliced tax code is broken. It’s time Congress stopped waving the flag, refrained from kissing the babies and fixed it.