2006
I don't think I really have time tonight to give this past year the justice it deserves, as amberphlame, myself, and a motley crew of miscreants (lune_a_tic, cidr, marzipan_pig, oranchina and her LJ-less boy, and possibly later on, poon [and possibly his mystery girl?]) are headin' down the Edgewater to gobble up deliciousness and bring in the new year (among other things we may do this eve
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Of course if the other woman thinks she's won you for good she's got another thing coming! I consider this just a minor setback.
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Happy new year and happy new marital status, to both of you!
On a side note...
My sister was recently complaining to me about having to file as married with her husband... she says it's better to file jointly than seperately, but neither are as good as filing as single, which you can't do if you're legally married. I know nothing about tax law, but do you have any idea what she might have been talking about?
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Whatever gave you that silly idea? :)
As for taxes, if both parties make comparable incomes, then there is the effective so-called "marriage tax" - a single person filing alone gets X as a standard deduction, but a married couple gets Y < 2X as their deduction.
For single-income homes, or just those where the incomes are pretty highly differentiated, one person (the one with the higher income) can claim the other as a legal dependant, and the main benefit is that instead of counting as one person making 'A', and another making 'a', you're effectively taxed as two people each making (A+a)/2, which is taxed at a lower percentage than A (but higher than a) due to our progressive tax code. The more highly disparate the incomes, the better this helps, and the more in overcompensates for the Y < 2X factor - and instead of "wasting" one of the X deductions on the lower income partner, you apply a higher deduction to the partner who's paying a higher percentage of their ( ... )
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My parents usually made about the same while I was growing up, although in different ways, so they probably had the same problem... I didn't realize it was that rare.
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I certainly wouldn't call it *rare* nowadays, but it'll still be uncommon - even if you ignore the whole childrearing aspect, pick two random people out of some population of people who could be interested in marrying each other, and generally they'll *not* have incomes that are particularly close to each other. Factor in the fact that women on the average make less money than men, even without children it becomes even less likely that both members of the couple will have close to the same salary.
Now 30 years ago, the average full-time employed woman made less than 60% of the average man, and then I *would* say that the occurrence of both spouses making within 5-10% of each other would indeed be signifigantly "rare".
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