Hypothesis: Church-going Christians pay the bills when it comes to taxation. The very people scorned by the popular culture are forking over the most money for all the social programs desired by that same popular culture. I haven't had the time to completely work out the math, but it seems right to me. Rather than wait to get it all together, I'm going to develop it in stages. Here's Part I. Now on to Part II.
This update is quite simple. Married people pay the bills. The IRS keeps statistics on this sort of thing and you can browse through them all you like right here. The data shown below comes from 2006, the latest year available on their site.
# of returns with taxable income over $200,000 by filing status:
Married - 3,437,970
Head of household (single parents) - 88,408
Single - 490,631
# of returns with taxable income over $100,000 by filing status:
Married - 13,611,336
Head of household (single parents) - 422,245
Single - 1,977,401
Married people file 85% of all returns with more than $100K of taxable income and 86% of all returns over $200K.
Married people pay the bills.
Aside: The next time you hear a politican rant on and on about how the rich need to pay more, substitute "the prudes" for "the rich." It might be instructive to find one of Obama's speeches and do that substitution ...
6 comments:
OK so far. One point, though:
How much of that is due to married couples where both have paying jobs? I mean, my household is under $100,000 at the moment because my wife is staying at home with the kids while they are young (which actually makes economic sense, because day-care for two kids under 5 costs a freaking fortune). If she still had the job she had before the girls were born, I think we'd be over. Are you really intending to hold up 2-income households who put their kids in day-care for at least 40 hours a week as being the ideal families?
I could also get into my dad's cousin, who last I heard was making a few million dollars a year, and was certainly married, so he'd be in the "over $200,000" category. Oh boy, was he married. He liked being married so much that he did it at least 4 times that I'm aware of. He was certainly supporting a lot of people through his taxes (along with a bunch of ex-wives directly). I wouldn't hold him up as a moral paragon worthy of emulation, though. I wouldn't consider him a prude, either.
Tim, good comment (as always). However that income is earned is irrelevant. Married couples are paying the taxes. That's now been put to bed.
Also put to bed is the argument that going to church is not an indicator of marital stability.
The possible mechanisms by which the prudes don't pay the bills is becoming more and more remote no matter how many examples like your brother or me you find.
Examples show mechanisms, statistics show frequency. Always remember: don't derive mortality statistics from a shark-bite victims' convention.
:-)
Whoops, I meant your dad's cousin and me, not your brother and me. My wrist is killing me and typing and mousing is a pain.
Yeah, I'm mostly just playing devil's advocate here - I agree that people who would be considered by some to be "prudes" probably do pay a disproportionate share of the taxes. I'm just cautions about (a) automatically coupling being a "prude " with being married, especially given what the divorce rate is; and (b) ignoring all the people who would be considered classic "prudes" (you know, monogamous types with no drinking, partying, out-of-wedlock children or wild anonymous sex), but aren't making your +$100K cutoff (me and my wife and our two kids, for example, or my brother and his wife and their 6 kids, or the many Apostolic Lutheran families around here who are stably married and have 5+ kids but are working in the logging industry and don't actually make all that much, to the point where a lot of them qualify for AFDC or food stamps).
I guess the whole Married + Rich = Prude (or Married + Prude = Rich, or Prude + Rich = Married, whichever way you want to run the causality) isn't quite working for me.
I can understand that. I think we classify things based on our world views and no two people have the same one.
Interesting analysis... though I must confess, it's hard to aspire to be a prude, even with all its apparent social benefits.
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