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Hi tedd
<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--> “But UDS, why should THIS lifestyle choice be different? If you favour the freedom to make individual choices on a tax-neutral basis why should this freedom apply only to single income versus double income married couples only? I'm sure some single people would love to spend a year in full-time education with the possibility (for example) of giving their partner or sibling the benefit of their "unused allowance" for that year in exchange for food and lodgings. Why can't they?”<!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->
Well, you raise the very interesting (and very broad) question of what recognition, if any, society should accord to marriage as opposed to other kinds of relationship. Some libertarians argue that marriage should be purely private affair, which civil laws should simply ignore. I don’t think that any country in the world has actually adopted that position – all give legal recognition to marriage in relation to matter such as inheritance, property rights, guardianship and custody of children, etc etc etc. Nearly all – in fact, probably all – would give recognition to marriage in the tax code.
Of course you can go further, and give some degree of legal recognition to non-marital “marriage-type” relationships, and many countries do – although not Ireland (at least so far as tax is concerned). I think you can justify drawing the line at marriage on the basis that married couples have a legal obligation to support one another financially, and a legal right to expect financial support from one another, and put themselves in a position where courts can reallocate their property and their income according to their respective needs without regard to which of them actually owns the property or earns the income. None of this is true of non-marital couples. Given this, and the economic reality of a couple who are formally and publicly committed to a permanent shared household, it is logical and consistent for the tax system to recognise their mutual interdependence, and to treat their incomes on an aggregate basis rather than as two separate incomes. Madonna has pointed out the ludicrous tax dodges which are possible for the well-advised when the tax code fails to recognise the social and economic realities of marriage.
Actually, I don’t think I’d have a fundamental problem with a system of freely transferrable tax allowances – at least, freely transferrable to anyone with whom you shared a common household, and I can see the arguments in favour of it. It would still be even further from the individualisation which you favour, of course. And individual tax allowances would have to be much smaller, since many more of them would be actually used to reduce tax bills. I, for example, would be able to use the tax allowances not just of my non-working spouse but of our seven children, two of <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--> their<!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> partners, my mother, my spouse’s mother, my spouse’s grandfather, two retired housekeepers and an elderly woman who calls herself my great-aunt but is in fact unrelated to me, all of whom live with us. Childless couples and single persons living alone would probably complain that the system was discriminatory.
