Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Working women lose to the tax collectors

The Washington Post has a great column on modern moms and outdated laws, but it applies to childless working women as well. Click here.

Impact graphs are here (read the whole thing, ladies):

Two-income families now constitute two-thirds of all married couples; women account for 59 percent of the American workforce. Yet working women ages 22-55 are paying some of the highest tax rates in the country and married women who work outside the home are likely to pay the highest marginal tax rates in the country.

These are just a few of the troubling facts contained in a new book Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws, co-written by Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel and John Goodman and Celeste Colgan of the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

"The entry of women into the workforce has been the greatest economic and sociological change in our society in the past 60 years," said Kim Strassel in a recent press release. "Despite this momentous transformation, our public policy institutions have failed to adjust."

According to the book, our country's major economic institutions -- including tax law, labor law, employee benefits law, Social Security and retirement policies -- reward families with a full-time worker and a stay-at-home spouse and, by comparison, punish every other arrangement.

The book highlights several examples of the penalties married working women face. For example:

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