I also have no idea what you're talking about.

But, generally, I'm not sure that incentivizing people to legally bond themselves to another is necessarily an unquestionably positive thing.

Married people are much more financially secure and thus capable of investing in the future. They can not only share expenses, but they amortize risks and can share trade-offs. This is borne out statistically (https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-marriage-good-you-1200...), but also is painfully obvious on inspection. If you’re going to start a business with someone, would you rather do it with a Partnership Agreement in place, or an unwritten “we’ll work together long as it’s convenient for both of us” understanding?

Because married people throughout time are wealthier. Married people make more money, married millenials own 70% of all the houses millenials have bought, married people are half as likely to be in proverty. If you have to choose a way for people to get wealthy between a college degree and marriage marriage would be the better decision by far.

Even if I assume you have stats to back that up, don't you think there's an itsy bitsy chance you're operating with a huge correlation / causation fallacy here? Does getting married automatically make you more wealthy, or are people who are already wealthy more likely to get married? It seems almost obvious that if there is any causation, it's in the latter direction.

Marriage does not make people wealthy at all. Instead, wealth makes people more likely to marry.

People with real issues, whether mental or criminal or sick etcetc both don't marry and have significantly smaller income. People with issues divorce more often and have smaller income too.

Except for the fact that we know people with lower income become wealthier than peoeple with lower incomes. And we know that the poverty rate for married lower income people is twice as low as the poverty rate for singles.

> Except for the fact that we know people with lower income become wealthier than peoeple with lower incomes. And we know that the poverty rate for married lower income people is twice as low as the poverty rate for singles.

We dont know that.

Unmarried lower income people are more likely to have criminal record, more likely to have mental health issues, more likely to be the ones having hard time to keep jobs, more likely to have drugs related issues. Among women, those who got pregnant before marriage and much harder time to get any money and also are less interesting romance target for guys.

People nowdays see marriage as something you do once you are set by your standars and that strongly biases who marry.

And yet married couples are still wealthier. And we do know that.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/in-the-balance/2018/...

The fact that a college educated person earns less than what you claim is a mentally unwell, non job having drug addict is sad but no all to unobvious. Why would you think a teaching degree or psych degree major would earn more over their lifetime than a plumber or construction worker.

The fact is single women benefit the most financially from marriage since single uneducated and college educated women have a much higher than average poverty rate.

Correlation is not causation

In this case because all other effects have been minimized across culture its causation across socio-economic classes

There are economic efficiencies there that are lost. Also makes people make longer term decisions. That said it does reduce the liquidity of the labour pool by causing the “two-body problem”.

Feel like you are putting the cart before the horse here. It's not like the government gives you a house and 40 acres for getting married.

You do get tax breaks, and a number of other benefits (in particular related to having children). You also get a tax break on a certain amount of paid interest on a house purchase.

Plus, there's the whole " allowed to be next to your loved one in the hospital" thing that's overlooked until it's needed.

So, no 40 acres, but there are benefits beyond two incomes.

I have no idea what tax breaks I'm supposed to have gotten from being married. Our collective taxes went up after being married. Is the tax thing folklore from the era when only one partner worked? And mortgage interest being deductible has nothing to do with marriage.

I (well, We) got one. It's going to vary based on your number of dependents and your tax bracket. Tax law being so super-easy-to-understand here in the states. /s

WRT mortgages, given some of the other threads in this discussion pointing out that something like 70% of millennial homeowners were married, it certainly seems relevant.

EDIT: It looks like it really depends on the income levels of both parties. Two well paid professionals will probably see a penalty filing jointly, whereas a single professional income will likely see a benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty

Two people working together can generate more wealth than one person working alone. It's not a controversial concept.

By that token so can 20 people working together.

Sure but getting 20 people to live together for an extended period of time is logistically difficult. Two people who already want to be/live together can more easily commit to long economic partnerships like buying a house. It's important to note that while people have been getting married for a long time, having two incomes is relatively new and only recently the norm since women were discouraged from entering the workforce until WW2 and up until the 70s.

Some argue there is a "Two-Income Trap" where having two incomes did make certain things more affordable for the middle class like housing but eventually it simply drove up the price of housing & other goods. So now a dual income is simply normal and only having a single income is a disadvantage. Therefore it's not super surprising to see single young adults moving back home.

In certain super high CoL areas like the Bay Area we do see a bit of a trend towards 3+ communal living (post college) in the form of group homes. While this decreases the burden of real estate prices, in most cases residents are not building up equity in the home since they rent. In some cases they may be saving enough to offset the lack of equity but that's probably not very common.

Single income families are a very recent aberration that covers a tiny slice of human history. In medieval Europe for example everyone gathered the harvest.

It’s largely an outgrowth of extreme prosperity and urbanization.

yes its called a company

Marriage does not mean both couples will be working.

Conversely, you don't need to be married to be in a relationship with two incomes.

> Marriage does not mean both couples will be working.

That's true. But a full-time homemaker usually generates economic value that saves money in a long litany of ways. Staying home with kids saves on childcare. Being able to cook meals saves on eating out. Laundry and cleaning saves money on housekeeping costs. Not to mention all of this labor is accumulated tax-free (i.e. if you work to pay for some expense, you have to pay tax on the income first.)

> Conversely, you don't need to be married to be in a relationship with two incomes.

You absolutely don't. But the statistics are unambigious. Unmarried couples are substantially more likely to split than married ones. The dissolution of a household tends to be an expensive affair that permanently impedes wealth accumulation.

Not to mention that because of this, unmarried couples are substantially less likely to join their finances. Therefore they tend to get significantly worse deals than couples with joined finances. For example two-incomes who jointly sign a mortgage can get a much better APR, than when the mortgage is in one person's name.

Two people can work and live together without getting married

Yeh and people are givin that for a college degree yet that is associated with wealth even though married highschool educated people out earn single college educated people.

Forget what the government does its generally easier to build wealth with two people than one. Theres more flexibility to prevent failure.

I'm sorry, but aren't you pointing out the obvious? Of course 2 people make more money than one. Are you saying that the individual that is married makes more than a single college educated person?

Also I'd question that statistic - the older you are the more likely you are married and more likely you are further in your career.

Yeh but what you think I am saying is a married high school educated person make more as a couple than a single unmarried college educated person. Except thats not true. The married college educated man alone makes more than the single unmarried college educated women/man typically.

I worked with a bunch of "millennials" at my previous job (the entire social media team). This is anecdotal, but, yeah, a lot of them were worried about having a stable career first before they could commit to marriage.

And yet, the planet itself is unstable.

I both agree and disagree with your position...

I agree in that married couple are normally muti-income households which makes them wealthy

I disagree that it should be the role of government to incentivize or decentivize marriage

We can resolve this by allowing people to form their own "households" for tax purposes and it should not matter if they are related, married, sleeping with each other, etc.

If they live in the same house, they should be treated as a household and be taxes according to that (or individually if they desire)

I would like to see an end to all government regulations on interpersonal relationships.

I think it would be helpful and you wouldn't be getting negative reactions if you actually posted some examples. I can't think of a single thing government has done to "roadblock marriage".

Under the Obama administration marriage benefits were extended to same-sex couples EXPANDING the government's push for more people to be married.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161110003040/https://www.justi...

> I can't think of a single thing government has done to "roadblock marriage".

Land use restrictions, housing regulations, and zoning laws substantially increase housing costs. Affordable family formation is the major driver of marriage rates. Housing costs are the primary component of affordable family formation.

There are plenty of places where you can find affordable housing in the US. Are marriage rates the same there?

Marriage rates are substantially higher in the cheap housing Southeast, Midwest and Texas than they are in the Northeast and West Coast.

The marriage rate isn't different enough across these states to justify the argument of housing. In fact, most places where housing is cheapest isn't the place where marriage rates are higher than the national rate.

Oregon and Washington outperform many southeastern states, in fact they surpass every southeastern state, according to the US census. And while N-E and CA do have a lower marriage rate, it isn't that much lower.

Ah yes, like how the federal government makes you pay taxes on the "value" of health insurance when you insure your common law partner but not when you're married ? Come on.

I'm confused, in what way has the government deincentivized/roadblocked marriage?

There are strong incentives in higher income brackets for tax purposes and such. In the lower/minimum wage sphere, marriage can have the opposite effect. You can loose access to various government programs such as food stamps because suddenly your family income counts. I've heard that support for single parents and low earning single parents has been increased in recent decades, which has led to lower rates of marriage and subsequent erosions to the general fabric in that socioeconomic sphere.

Even the article admits the data contained therein is more an interesting point than an actual decision criteria for anyone getting married:

>Few couples base their marriage decisions on the tax consequences that may result.

I'm willing to bet the number of 20-somethings that have "tax considerations" deciding their marital status can be measured in basis points. Furthermore, nothing I see there is a "new penalty", while the numbers have varied over time, those rules look to be exactly the same as they were 20 years ago.

First, this has been around for a long time. So it has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is recently less people getting married.

Second, you are nuts if you think this has ANY significant impact on people getting married.

Third, you can file married filed separately.. so while I'm not up on all the details of that, you can probably avoid the simple impacts it might have.

Anyway, that is an extremely crazy weak argument.

This penalty basically starts at 250k in combined income. The median household income is $60,700 as of 2018.

Sure doesn't. My wife and I made the same amount of money, within 1% of each other, when we got married. We both changed out deduction from single to married. Tax bill came around and we owed 10k.

Our income at the time, combined, was ~160k.

The loss of EITC affects low incomes.

The mortgage deduction affects anyone with a "large" mortgage, but at current housing prices "large" is becoming the norm.

So a few things the government does is favor oneside in divorce and family courts. They will give housing and money through programs to keep people single via section 8 and foodstamps programs. They incentivize single motherhood by allow fathers to be replaced by government checks.

All these things whether good or bad makes it less likely people settle for pairing together like they typically would have.

To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion about this, and I'm not making a claim that marriage is a good or a bad thing, I'm just answering your question.

The usual argument that says that the government disincentivized marriage is through social safety nets like welfare, particularly ones that pay more for single parents without a spouse in the house, as well as mechanisms like child support payments.

The usual argument that says society has disincentivized marriage is basically through access to sex. There used to be a culture of enforced monogamy, where there was enormous social pressure to be married before having sex, and especially before living with one another. Now, that stigma is largely gone, so the incentive to get married has diminished substantially.

Again, not making a value judgement, just answering the question.

Wait, marriage is disincentived because government is not forcing people to stay in it?

I'm not sure you read my comment, and if you did, you certainly didn't understand it.

A marriage of equals does not work. If every decision has to get a consensus it leads to ample opportunity for deep resentment, stress and a lower quality of life overall. One parter must be the dominant one.

Which is what led to big rates of domestic abuse and violence.

Well we have well enforced laws against that which should doubtless remain unchanged. I’m saying the expectation going into a marriage should be that one partner is dominant so there are no power struggles much like a hierarchy in a company.

We have laws against that, but not much well enforced. Most of domestic violence happen in private without witness. Even if aggressor is removed temporary, they live together so it is easy to retaliate after. Plus, it is shameful to be victim of domestic abuse. So, reports are few and come in too late and it is hard to prove they are true.

Plus, the enforcement is hard. And even harder since domestic violence rates among cops are higher then those of general population.

> I’m saying the expectation going into a marriage should be that one partner is dominant so there are no power struggles much like a hierarchy in a company.

Aaaand this is literally what leads to abuse. See, the perfect compliance is not possible nor actually human. The one dominator is bound to do dumb or egoistic decisions here and there. Or decisions that ignore needs of partner due to ignorance. With partner being submissive and not providing feedback, dominating person is bound to become worst and worst.

Plus, actual humans have real need for own agency. And when that agency manifests, again, the one who feels entitled to rule it all becomes abusive.

Well anecdotally the only good marriages I’ve seen adhere to the above. The partner provides feedback but have no say in the final decision. In a marriage one person needs to be submissive. I’ve been married for more than a decade and we’ve never been happier. Individual agency is only important if you don’t have a community based aspect to your life that respects you explicitly for the larger good your submissive role plays for a better outcome from a community perspective. People need respect, individual agency is just a route to accomplishing that.

You are happy and that is all that matters? Yeah, exactly the issue with that setup. It is you first, then some nonsense about why other has to sacrifice for community.

I said we are happy. Both my wife and I.