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Journal Article

Race, Class, and Gender Essentialism inTax Literature: The Joint Return

01 Oct 1997-Washington and Lee Law Review (Washington & Lee University, School of Law)-Vol. 54, Iss: 4, pp 1469
TL;DR: For example, the authors examined the tax consequences of married women as marginal or secondary wage earners and found that many married women are not marginal wage earners, but contribute significant amounts to household income.
Abstract: [T]ax-law decisions are cultural artifacts - understood as a part of a larger societal structure and, simultaneously, revealing of that culture.1 I. Introduction The current literature discussing the federal tax laws' gender bias ignores all racial differences among women.2 Even the few authors who have acknowledged class distinctions similarly ignore racial differences among women.3 This Article demonstrates how the literature's gender essentialism masks the bias in the federal tax laws based upon race, class, and gender in ways previously ignored. For example, the literature focuses exclusively on the tax consequences of married women as marginal or secondary wage earners.4 The literature concludes that the gender bias of federal tax laws operates to encourage women to remain at home and out of the waged labor market.5 The literature's solutions, therefore, are designed to encourage women to work more in the waged labor market. The literature's gender bias analysis can be correct only if all married women are marginal wage earners. This Article examines never before published Census Bureau data to show that many married women are not marginal wage earners.6 Accordingly, an analysis of the gender bias in the federal tax laws from a non-essentialist perspective is needed. This Article provides such an analysis. This Article demonstrates that the married women most likely to be marginal wage earners, namely those who are the exclusive focus of the literature, are upper-income and white. In addition, the married women least likely to be marginal wage earners, namely those who were previously ignored by the literature, are most likely to be African-American. By constructing all families as homogeneous, the literature successfully masks any race, class, or gender bias that may be embedded in the operation of the federal tax laws. As Professor Fellows notes, "the hallmark of successful subordination is when subordinating actions and beliefs become so accepted that they become indisputable and widely accepted as reflecting fairness and objective truth."7 This Article unmasks the race, class, and gender biases in the federal tax laws previously ignored by questioning the "indisputable and widely accepted truth" articulated in the gender bias tax literature that all married women are marginal wage earners. Part II provides a summary of the existing gender bias tax literature.8 It begins with the literature's treatment of all husbands as primary wage earners and all wives as marginal wage earners.9 It then describes three federal tax provisions and policies that the literature suggests interact to penalize married women and their families when married women are marginal wage earners, namely: (I)the operation of the joint return which is designed to treat married couple as a single taxable unit;10 (2) the exclusion from income of the value of services contributed by a spouse to their household;11 and (3) the deductibility of child care expenses.12 Part II concludes by describing the literature's suggested solutions to the gender bias found in the federal tax laws.13 Part III examines Census Bureau household income data to show how the literature's treatment of all married women as marginal wage earners is overinclusive.14 Many married women are not marginal wage earners, but contribute significant amounts to household income.15 Once differences among married women are recognized, the federal tax laws must be re-examined for race, class, and gender biases previously ignored by the literature. For example, the federal tax laws penalize households in which spouses contribute roughly equal amounts to household income.16 This Part shows that AfricanAmerican households are more likely to pay a penalty under the federal tax laws because African-American spouses are more likely to contribute roughly equal amounts to household income.17 Part IV examines the solutions previous literature has designed to address the gender bias found in the federal tax laws. …

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries.
Abstract: This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may structure durable inequalities of race and gender, and earnings-conditional tax subsidies may alleviate poverty more effectively and with less stigma than means-tested social spending. Scholars also find the most generous welfare states rely the most heavily on regressive taxes, although there is disagreement over how this association arises. Comparative research on developing countries shows consumption taxes are more conducive to growth than taxes on income, tax-financed spending benefits growth if it is spent on productive investments, and taxation strengthened de...

69 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: Critical race theory as discussed by the authors is a body of work that first emerged in American legal scholarship in the late 1980s and has since spread to other disciplines and investigates a paradox: How does racism persist despite its nearly universal condemnation by state policy and by the norms of polite society?
Abstract: Critical race theory is a body of work that first emerged in American legal scholarship in the late 1980s and has since spread to other disciplines. It investigates a paradox: How does racism persist despite its nearly universal condemnation by state policy and by the norms of polite society? Rejecting the conventional liberal position that racism survives only as a relic from a less-enlightened time or as a characteristic of poorly educated or troubled individuals, critical race theorists take the position that racism is ordinary and normal in contemporary society, indeed perhaps integral to social practices and institutions.

30 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States and found that most forms of tax limitation exacerbate racial inequality, providing the greatest reduction in effective tax rates to white homeowners.
Abstract: In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of property tax limitation exacerbate racial inequality, providing the greatest reduction in effective tax rates to white homeowners. In the aggregate, these inequalities result in substantially unequal tax savings that might not survive democratic scrutiny if they were distributed as direct subsidies. This inequality may be especially problematic insofar as tax privileges for property owners effectively disguise a public benefit as a private property right.

16 citations

01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined how Canadian fiscal policy reinforces the many social, economic and legal barriers women face when they try to gain equal access to full-time work with equal pay, and examined structural proposals that would remove or reduce these barriers to women's labour force participation.
Abstract: Women in Canada continue to have lower shares of income than men throughout their lives. At the same time, women continue to bear disproportionately larger shares of unpaid, poorly paid, part-time and other forms of irregular work. This study analyzes how Canadian fiscal policy reinforces the many social, economic and legal barriers women face when they try to gain equal access to full-time work with equal pay, and examines structural proposals that would remove or reduce these barriers to women’s labour force participation. The author concludes that four basic structural changes should be made at once to reduce those barriers as much as possible: recast all the joint provisions in tax and social assistance law as individual provisions, permit secondary earners to claim all the actual costs of work-related expenses, reduce the marginal tax rates imposed on low incomes and eliminate the bias against women caused by the rules governing employee fringe benefits, employment insurance and retirement pensions. Failing the political will to take all these steps, the author proposes the enactment of an earned income credit that can be claimed by all secondary earners to ameliorate the existing fiscal barriers to women’s labour force participation. Only such a credit system would counterbalance the unrelenting pressure on women to substitute unpaid work for paid work at the margins.

15 citations

Book
01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of relationship recognition on lesbian women as a class was evaluated and two main conclusions were reached: First, all statutes that recognize lesbian and gay relationships continue to discriminate against them in many ways.
Abstract: This study evaluates the impact of relationship recognition on lesbian women as a class. Two main conclusions are reached. First, all statutes that recognize lesbian and gay relationships continue to discriminate against them in many ways. Second, extending spousal treatment to lesbian and gay couples for federal income taxation, social assistance and retirement programs will result in disproportionately higher taxes and reduced social benefits for those lesbian and gay couples with the lowest incomes. Using microsimulation, those new costs are projected to be in the order of $130 million to $155 million in 2000, while new fiscal benefits of relationship recognition are only about $10 million to $15 million. These costs fall most heavily on lesbian women and on low-income gay couples. As women, lesbian women are heavily disadvantaged by their gender, and this disadvantage is further compounded by the effects of sexuality, race, disability, age and family responsibility. Using low-income cutoffs, family income concepts, the tax on marriage and presumed economies of scale to limit low-income assistance turns relationship recognition into a way to increase the total tax load on low-income couples. The solutions recommended in this study include eliminating all remaining forms of discrimination in federal law on the basis of sexuality and shifting from the use of the couple as the basic unit of tax/transfer policy to the use of the individual as the basic policy unit. These steps, when combined with the extension of employee family benefits and tax provisions relating to non-conjugal couples, and the repeal of tax/transfer benefits for the support of economically dependent able-bodied adults, will eliminate much of the regressivity of the tax/transfer system at lower income levels. Enhancing the progressivity of the total tax system will further assist in improving the incidence of government penalties on low-income couples and households. Recommendations for enhanced data collection, protection of human rights and law reform are also made.

8 citations