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.