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Once upon a time,
there was a happy and prosperous Kingdom, filled with contented families and
beautiful children. The land was ruled by a wise and kindly old King. This
King had a venerable Prime Minister as well, who had been in office even during
the reign of the old King's father. Some people from other lands criticized the
Kingdom for being too generous to its subjects. Yet, by every measure, this
Kingdom was perhaps the richest on earth. The Kingdom’s workshops made and sold
wonderful things that all the world wanted. Others came from nearby lands to
work in this felicitous place. The old Prime Minister called this land "The
People's Home." As his predecessor had once explained: "It is a matter of
creating comfort and well-being…, making [the home] good and warm, light and
cheerful and free. To a woman there should be no more attractive mission."[1]
The fathers of the
Kingdom received handsome pay for their good work. The mothers of the Kingdom
did craft beautiful homes and lovingly watched as their rosy-cheeked children
scampered by the lakes and in the fields and forests of this blessed land.
But it came to pass
that a Wicked Force arose, seeking to destroy the happy Kingdom. The good King
had grown tired and frail. His grandson and heir seemed to be a stuttering boy;
some considered him mentally "slow." The old Prime Minister grew tired, as
well, and gave his post to another, and younger, man.
This new Prime
Minister was charming and energetic, but he had a cruel gleam in his left eye.
The Kingdom was too contented, he thought; too happy. It needed
to be shaken up and remade in a better, even revolutionary way. He pondered how
this might be done.
A group of gnomes came to his aid. These
gnomes wore green eyeshades and labored in the deepest dungeons of the Royal
Palace. The old Prime Minister had confined them to trivial tasks, like
counting beans, where they did little harm. But the new Prime Minister asked
the gnomes to foretell the future. Gazing into their Crystal, the gnomes saw a
time ahead of still greater prosperity. But the workshops of the Kingdom would
need more workers, they cautioned. The gnomes also warned that future
immigrants would be different from those of the past, people of darker skins and
stranger tongues who would pollute the land with their foreign ways. "They
won't look like us," the gnomes hissed. It would be better, they said, if the
Prime Minister would force the mothers of the Kingdom out of their homes and
into the workshops, so as to keep the dark strangers away.
Also coming to the
new Prime Minister's aid was a gaggle of sorceresses. These wizened creatures
had cold hearts and looked with loathing at the pretty homes, hardworking and
doting fathers, loving mothers, and frolicking children of the Kingdom. These
homes must be shattered into shards, they said. The fathers must be stripped of
status. The mothers must be put into the workshops of the Kingdom. And the
children must be gathered into little workhouses of their own, where they can be
taught about their function in the new order and about the miseries of the old
ways.
The new Prime
Minister pondered the counsel of the gnomes and the sorceresses. He wondered:
What would be the best way to dissolve the homes, cripple the fathers, and push
the mothers into workshops and the children into their little workhouses?
Then a terrible grin crossed his face. He knew what to do!
The next day, he
issued his decree: "In the past, the Royal taxes were imposed on families as a
unit, whereby fathers and mothers could split their income and so reduce their
tax. Henceforward, the Royal taxes shall be imposed on each individual alone.
'Marriage' and 'home' shall no longer be considered in the imposition of the
Royal taxes."
The new Prime
Minister was delighted. With this simple change, he raised the
marginal-tax-rate on the average family with a mother-at-home to a staggering 90
percent. Meanwhile, the home with both mother and father in workshops
would now have a marginal-tax-rate much lower at 40 percent.[2]
From this point on, it would become more valuable for any extra income to be
earned by the mother and not the father.
The gnomes were
delighted, as well: no people with colored skin would now be needed in the
Kingdom. The sorceresses shreiked with joy; they would long call this change
the "most important" step in their plot to destroy the Kingdom's happy homes.
Alas, there is no
pleasant ending to this fairy tale. The people of the Kingdom would not live
happily ever after. No virtuous knight would come to their rescue.
Indeed, this is not
even a fairy tale. It is the true story (with certain embellishments) of what
happened in the Kingdom of Sweden in the year 1971, when that nation switched
from the joint income tax return to mandatory individual filing. The old King
was Gustav VI Adolph; the old Prime Minister, Tage Erlander; the new Prime
Minister, Olof Palme (dangerously educated at Kenyon College in Ohio); the new
young King, Karl XVI Gustav; and so on through the cast. Because of this policy
change in 1971, Sweden today has the most "fully individualized taxation system"
in the developed world. It imposes the same tax schedule on all persons without
any attention to marital status, dependents, employment, or the income of a
spouse.[3]
The remarkable fact
is that this policy, said to be especially designed to help women, did not
result from the wishes of Swedish women. From 1945 until 1970, the large
majority of Swedish mothers were full time homemakers, married to classic
"breadwinner" husbands. The labor force participation rate for women over age
15 remained constant at about 30 percent, lower than the U.S. figure
during those Baby-Booming years. Only 25,000, or a mere three percent,
of Swedish preschool children were in public daycare centers in 1965.[4]
As two feminist analysts would later admit, "[t]he increasing attention extended
to working women did not result from an overwhelming constituency demand
from women themselves."[5]
Young Swedish mothers, by all accounts, were largely happy with their lot.
Rather, the
pressure for change came from elsewhere. With demand for labor mounting in
Sweden during the boom years of the 1960's, the big corporations thought they
needed a new source of labor. The labor unions, for their part, opposed more
immigration into the country, quietly anxious about the competition and
the Third World complexions of the probable newcomers. As substitutes, the
union leadership was willing to turn over the wives of their members, and their
daughters as well, to the industrial sector. The Labor Market Board began an
advertising campaign to encourage mothers-at-home to seek employment.
Pressure for a
shift in the tax code also came from a small cadre of feminist activists. In
the mid-1960's, the People's Party--libertarian individualist, and
pro-corporation in orientation--began to push for an end to the joint income tax
return. They called for mandatory individual filing as an expression of liberty
and equality; it would also be good for business.[6]
The feminist writer Eva Moberg complained that the current tax system condemned
educated women to "lifetime imprisonment within the four walls of the home." In
1968, a joint report by the Social Democratic Party and the trade union alliance
(the LO) concluded that "there are…strong reasons for making the two breadwinner
family the norm in planning long-term changes within the social insurance
system."[7]
The next year, the Social Democratic Party issued its "Report on Equality." The
document called for a tax-policy based on individual earnings, without
preference for any so-called "form of cohabitation."[8]
Analysts of modern
Sweden are virtually unanimous in labeling this 1971 shift from "joint" to
"individual" taxation as the most important policy change affecting Swedish
social life during the last 40 years. Sven Steinmo calls it "the most
significant" and "radical" reform of the turbulent 1970's, because "it meant
that the Swedish tax system would ignore family circumstances" in calculating
tax burden.[9]
Through this change, reports Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, the traditional male
provider norm was "more or less eradicated."[10]
The influential feminist author Annika Baude adds: "If I were to choose one
reform which has perhaps done the most to promote equality between the sexes [in
Sweden], I would point to the introduction of individual income taxation."[11]
Using a different interpretive lens, it is fair to conclude that Sweden's
current regime of few and weak marriages, fragile homes, widespread
cohabitation, extensive day care, low fertility, and universal employment of
young mothers derives--to a significant degree--from this one change in
tax policy.
Why should we
care? Sweden is a relatively small country with a population about half that of
Illinois. Does the Swedish example really matter?
It does.
First, Sweden is the model held up by virtually all Americans arguing for a
radical change in this nation's family structure and/or family policy. Sweden
is "the progressive alternative," the "one nation that takes gender equality
seriously," the home of universal day care, paid parental leave, and purposeful
gender-role engineering. Given this status, it is vitally important that
advocates for traditional families understand the origin and content of the
Swedish model.
Second, this story
about Sweden underscores the ideologically charged nature of modern taxation.
Given the vast intrusion of tax collection into daily life, tax policy is no
longer simply about the best or most efficient way to raise funds to pay for
necessary government functions. Tax policy today is just as much about the nature of the social order and the direction in which this (or any) society will move.
Twenty-First Century tax policy can reflect a normative social order or it can
engineer it in one or another direction. But it cannot be impartial.
Third, advocates
for the traditional family must enter the tax policy fray with eyes open and
with purposeful goals. For it is over tax policy –almost uniquely – that all
special interests collide. Families cannot count on Congress or state
legislatures to do the right thing here, working by group instinct alone.
Joint-stock corporations, unions, small businesses, charities, feminists,
schools, environmentalists, sexual minorities: all of these categories--and
countless more—also have a stake in every round of significant tax
reform. Indeed, it is in this issue area--perhaps more than any other--that the
relative strength of “special interests” can best be tested. Family advocates
must have their priorities clear and their coalition firm if they are to protect
families from harm and gain their share of any "reform."
So, in the balance of this
paper, I want to present what I consider to be The Ten Commandments for Taxing
the Family. Alas, I cannot claim that I found these commandments etched in
stone on a high mountain or near a burning bush. Yet they do reflect thirty
years of thought on the subject. Their common goal is to protect and encourage
marriage, marital childbearing, and intergenerational responsibility.
Commandment # 1:
Thou shalt know that there is no ‘tax neutrality’ relative to the family.
It is possible to have a tax that is so small that it is little more than a
nuisance. Indeed, some little taxes can even be charming in their way.[12]
Other taxes of somewhat greater size also do not seem to affect social behavior
to much extent. A study of personal income tax exemptions, for instance, found
that while the real value of the federal exemption had a strong
effect on fertility (more on that later), the value of state income tax
exemptions had no significant effect; not that much money was involved.[13]
And it is possible that a society can have a normative social order so strong
and pervasive that a tax’s structure and operation merely reinforce what already
exists. One might see the social regime under the Tax Reform Act of 1948 –
widespread marriage, low divorce, and booming fertility – in this light.[14]
However, once a tax
exceeds the 5 percent figure (as federal income and payroll taxes surely do) and if the citizenry is somewhat less than unanimous about the way to live
the good life, then notions of fairness and neutrality become contentious.
Traditional family
advocates must also be aware that other lifestyle partisans are now deeply
engaged in the tax reform debate, with rival definitions of “neutrality” and
“fairness.” As already noted, neo-classical liberalism – or libertarianism if
you prefer – has a strong loathing for joint filing by married couples,
preferring for philosophical reasons a strict focus on the individual.[15]
The related idea-system called equity feminism puts forward the “economic
independence between spouses” as its guiding principle.[16]
Homosexual activists have
also entered the fray. Writing in The University of San Francisco Law Review,
legal theorist Patricia Cain blasts the U.S. Tax Code for “privileging
heterosexuality.”
The message of this key
commandment can be summed up this way: in a socially disordered time, one
person’s “tax neutrality” is another person’s “bias.” Worldviews are actually
in conflict here: enter the political battle fully prepared.
Commandment # 2:
Thou shalt treat the family, not the individual, as the unit of taxation.
This follows logically from the lessons cited earlier. It also resonates as a
basic human right. No less a document than The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, crafted in 1948 and ratified by the United States Senate, declares that
“the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is
entitled to protection by society and the state (Article 16).” In this
light, and given what we know about its effects, the imposition of mandatory
individual income tax filing could properly be viewed as the violation of a
fundamental human right.
A preference for
income splitting also represents common sense. As two become one flesh, a home
emerges: a real place with its own economic rules. Boris Bittker notes that
“[m]arriage affects the legal rights of each spouse to what would otherwise be
‘his’ and ‘her’ unfettered income by creating an obligation of support and
restrictions on the right to transfer property during life and at death.”[17]
The pooling of resources, to a greater or lesser degree, also occurs in every
marriage. For these reasons, income splitting is the only logical and fair
accommodation to this status. It recognizes that a new partnership has formed,
that sharing occurs, and that both spouses (even if one is a homemaker)
contribute to the realization of earned income.[18]
Commandment # 3
: Thou shalt affirm the birth, nurture, and protection of children as the
first and central purpose of human society, and not as simply another consumer
choice.
Libertarian
economists apparently believe that babies grow in cabbage patches. This is the
only logical explanation for their otherwise remarkable assumption that the
choice of having a child is simply another way to consume. Some folks choose
dogs, cars, or boats, they say; others choose children; and the tax code should
treat all such choices equally.
As Bittker properly
responds, “no one but a tax theorist … could fail to see the difference”[19]
between a new baby and a new car. Children are more than another hobby. Their
birth and nurture form the core purpose for all societies and all governments,
throughout time. Tax policy must be aware of and generous toward children if it
is to be just and good.
Commandment #4:
Thou shalt see the home economy as a private sphere, guided by altruism, that
may never be taxed, directly or indirectly. The dream of every socialist
has been to create a society resting on perfect sharing: from each according to
his or her ability, to each according to his or her need. When applied to vast
societies, the result has invariably been coercion, injustice, torture, and
poverty, for such systems have been unable to make effective judgements about
the character and worthiness of individuals. But the altruism principle
actually works within the good family. Sharing and caring, not cash, are
the two currencies of family relations.
What sort of
government could stoop so low as to tax love and sharing? Actually, the U.S.
Federal government already does; and some advocates hope for considerably more.
How did this happen?
For example, the
Dependent Care Tax Credit, initiated in the mid-1970’s, has provided generous
tax relief to parents purchasing substitute childcare. Tax analysts see it as a
way to balance – or indirectly tax – the so-called “imputed income” that the
mother-at-home provides her husband and children. Similarly, the 1981
“correction” to the marriage penalty then in the tax code also sought to balance
off (e.g., indirectly tax) the “imputed income” provided by the full-time
homemaker: this time, by a special credit granted to two-income households.
The push to tax
family altruism continues. Writing recently in The Georgetown Law Review,
Nancy Staudt builds a case for “taxing housework.” She urges the imposition of
income and payroll taxes on husbands and children receiving the
services of wives and mothers; indeed, the more children in the family, the
higher the tax she would impose on them for having a mother at home.[20]
Commandment # 5:
Thou shalt treat men and women as equal in rights but commonly and properly
different in function; law – including tax law – can take these facts into
account. Equity feminism, which insists on exactly equal treatment of men
and women under every circumstance, violates common sense, human nature, and
human rights. At the most obvious level, only women can conceive and carry
children within their bodies; develop a unique hormonal bond with their children
mediated through that remarkable organ, the placenta; give birth; and breastfeed
their infants with that amazing food called mothers’ milk. For these reasons,
and many more, Article 25 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms
that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special protection.” The
legal program of equity feminism can properly be seen as a violation of this
universally recognized human right.
Moreover, the work
of Nobel Laureate Gary Becker underscores that the economic foundation of strong
marriages rests on a division-of-labor within the home, where the spouses
specialize: commonly, one in home production and the other in market labor.[21]
The use of tax law to coerce a false equality of function is a direct assault on
those who seek to build strong marriages.
Commandment # 6:
Thou shalt privilege heterosexual marriage in law because it is the only
structure in which new human life can be naturally created and properly
protected and nurtured. Only heterosexual couples can create babies.
Beyond that vastly important fact, the social science evidence is also
overwhelming that children growing up in homes with their two natural parents
are more likely to be healthy, happy, safe, intelligent, successful, and alive
than children living in any other arrangement. Heterosexual marriage is good
for children and good for society and the state.[22]
It follows that
homosexual couples do not have a valid claim for equal treatment with married
heterosexuals in tax law.
Commandment # 7:
Thou shalt know that the market economy exists to serve the family, not the
other way around. Under American law, joint stock corporations enjoy a
number of advantages – including tax advantages – denied to the little economic
entities called families.[23]
Economists of the neo-classical liberal bent incessantly complain whenever
someone chooses to perform tasks on a family-centered basis instead of selling
their labor time on the market; they call such altruism a “dead weight loss.”[24]
Such arguments, of
course, have everything backward. Absent recognition of the family as the
natural and fundamental unit of society, capitalists and socialists alike wind
up worshipping at the same dehumanized; materialistic economic altar. Let me
restate the truth: The economy is an artifice, the creation of humankind, and it
exists to serve families. Public policy must always put families first.
Commandment # 8.
Thou shalt compensate families for tax-driven distortions of the natural
family economy. Payroll taxes are a particularly striking example of how
state policy corrupts family life. To begin with, FICA taxes and the social
security system that they maintain create incentives that drive out
family-centered care and reduce fertility. By “socializing” elder care, Old Age
Survivors Insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid discourage intergenerational family
responsibility. As late as 1957, a majority of the aged still drew significant
financial support from their grown children; by 1980, only four percent did.
Accordingly, it is appropriate and necessary for tax policy to blunt or reverse the
anti-family incentives of social insurance. Specifics could include generous
tax credits and deductions for both dependent children and home-based elder
care.
Commandment # 9:
Thou shalt treat “human capital” formation as no less important than physical
or financial capital formation. “Human capital” formation can be measured
both quantitatively, in terms of new life, and qualitatively, in terms of the
transmission of character traits, cultural and practical education, good health,
and solid virtues to the new generation. Tax policy should encourage both
forms.
At present, though,
federal tax subsidies discourage the proven, superior methods of childrearing.
For example, the evidence is strong that infants and toddlers thrive best
emotionally, physically, and intellectually when they are in the full time care
of their natural parents at home.[25]
However, current Federal policy provides massive tax support (worth up to $5,000
annually per household, without income limit) only to parents who
purchase inferior, substitute, non-parental care. This is remarkably foolish,
for small children in daycare are more likely to suffer serious and frequent
illness, more likely to be quarrelsome, less likely to do well in school, and
more likely to suffer long term psychological problems than children cared for
at home.[26]
At the very least, the tax preference currently given to day-care users should
be at least balanced by an equal support for parents providing full-time care
for their children at home.
And Commandment # 10
: Thou shalt be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Frantic
warnings 40 years ago about the looming dangers of global overpopulation have
been replaced in the early 21st Century by a sobering spectra: the
reality of depopulation. No developed industrial nation anywhere on the globe
currently has a positive population growth rate. Deaths outnumber births. Even
in developing nations, fertility rates are tumbling.
In fact, the U.S.
tax system already includes a proven pro-natalist device: the exemption for
dependent children. In a series of papers, Leslie Whittington has shown the
“robust” effect of the personal exemption on fertility. When its real, after
inflation value rose, U.S. fertility also rose; when its real value fell, so did
fertility. Indeed, her results are stunning in their implication. She shows
that a 1 percent change in the exemption’s value causes a .839 percent increase
in birth probability.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 stabilized the value
of the personal exemption by indexing it to inflation. This protection of its
value may account for the relative demographic health of the United States.
While our nation is not growing through native births, it is also not
shrinking. The U.S. total fertility rate is exactly at the replacement level :
2.1 children born per woman over the average reproductive lifetime. This is the
highest figure recorded for any developed nation. Any increase in the real
value of the exemption for children would be good public policy.
Allow me to
summarize the Ten Commandments for Taxing the Family, by rephrasing them as
simple principles,:
•
Tax neutrality is a function of worldview
•
The family should be the unit of taxation
•
The rearing of children is the core purpose of society
•
The home economy is a private sphere
•
Men and women are equal in rights, wonderfully and naturally different in
function
•
Heterosexual marriage is properly privileged in law
•
The economy exists to serve families
•
Policy-driven distortions of the home economy deserve compensation
•
Human capital deserves affirmation
•
New human life is good for this country.
In the Fairy Tale with which
I began, the Happy Kingdom had once rested on these principles. But new leaders
came along who denied them all. The United States has a different history,
and--I hope--a more promising future, resting on the affirmation of the natural
family. May it be so.
* Allan Carlson is
President of The Howard Center and Distinguished Fellow in Family Policy
Studies at The Family Research Council. He holds his Ph.D. in Modern
European History from Ohio University. His books include The Swedish
Experiment in Family Politics, Family Questions: Reflections on
The American Social Crisis, and ‘The American Way’: Family and
Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (forthcoming).
Endnotes:
[1] Quoted in Jane Lewis and Gertrude Åström,
"Equality, Difference, and State Welfare: Labor Market and Family
Policies in Sweden," Feminist Studies 18 (Spring 1992):
65. [2] From: Lewis and Åström, "Equality, Difference,
and State Welfare," p. 67. The marginal tax rate for two-income
households became 68 percent. [3] On the unique status of Sweden in this regard,
see: Irene Dingeldey, "International Comparison of Tax Systems and their
Impact on the Work-Family Balancing," at
http://www.iatge.de/aktuellveroeff/am/dinge100b.pdf.
[4] Kerstin Sörensen and Christina Bergqvist,
Gender and the Social Democratic Welfare Regime: A Comparison of
Gender-Equality Friendly Policies in Sweden and Norway
(Stockholm: Arbetslivsinstitutet, 2002): 8; Lewis and Åström, "Equality,
Difference, and State Welfare," p. 66; and Annika Baude, "Public Policy
and Changing Family Patterns in Sweden, 1930-1977," in Jean
Lipman-Blumen and Jessie Bernard,eds. Sex Roles and Social Policy:
A Complex Social Science Equation (Beverly Hills: Sage Studies
in International Sociology, 1979): 147-49.
[5] Dorothy McBride Stetson and Amy Maxur, eds.,
Comparative State Feminism (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, 1995): 241. [6] Sörensen and Bergqvist, "Gender and the Social
Democratic Welfare Regime," p. 9.
[7] From: Lewis and Åström, "Equality, Difference,
and State Welfare," p. 67.
[8] Alva Myrdal, et. al, Toward
Equality: The Alva Myrdal Report to the Swedish Social Democratic Party
(Stockholm: Prisma; 1972 [1969] : 17, 38, 64, 82-84. See also: Hilda
Scott, Sweden's 'Right to Be Human': Sex-Role Equality: The Goal
and the Reality (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982: 3-7.
[9] Sven Steinmo, "Social Democracy vs. Socialism:
Goal Adaptation in Social Democratic Sweden," Politics & Society
16 (Dec. 1988): 430. [10] Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, "Dual Breadwinner
Societies: Provider Models in the Scandinavian Welfare States,"
Acta Sociologica 41 (#1, 1998): 66.
[11] Baude, "Public Policy and Changing Family
Patterns in Sweden," p. 171.
[12] For example, when I lived in Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, some years ago, the village imposed an annual “occupation
tax”: $25 for a doctor; $20 for a lawyer; $18 for a teacher; $12 for a
housewife, and so on. The tax was small, and had existed for over a century. The curious logic
behind its categories was long forgotten. I found it an intriguing and
charming historical artifact.
[13] Leslie A. Whittington, “State Income Tax Policy
and Family Size: Fertility and the Dependency Exemption,” Public
Finance Quarterly 21 (Oct. 1993): 390-92.
[14] Boris Bittker notes that the income-splitting
system introduced in 1948 worked equitably and well in that’s era
relatively “low divorce” culture. See: Boris I. Bittker, “Federal
Income Taxation and the Family,” Stanford Law Review 27 (July
1975): 1395. [15] Dingeldey, “International Comparison of Tax
Systems and their Impact on the Work-Family Balancing, “ p.5.
[16] Åsa Gunnarson, “Taxes, Social Benefits and the
Family,” paper presented at the ALTA Conference, Wellington, NZ, June
1999, p.5. [17] Bittker, “Federal Income Taxation and the
Family,” p. 1420. [18] The most thorough
analysis of income splitting is Charmaine Yoest’s, “Income Splitting: A
Solution to the Marriage Penalty?,” M.A. Thesis, University of Virginia,
2001. [19] Bittker, “Federal Income Taxation and the
Family,” p.1448. [20] Nancy C. Staudt, “Taxing Housework,”
Georgetown Law Review 84 (May 1996): 1574, 1622. A similar argument
is made in: Rolande Cuvillier, “Equality of Treatment for Housewives in
Tax and Benefit Systems: A Proposal,” Journal of Social Policy 22
(#4, 1993): 439-60. [21] Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
[22] For a good summary of His evidence, see: Bridget
Maher, Ed., The Family Portrait: A Compilation of Data, Research and
Public Opinion on the Family )Washington, DC: Family Research
Council, 2002): chapters 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16.
[23] Bittker, “Federal Income Taxation and the
Family,” p. 1457; and Ralph Borsodi, Prosperity and Security: A Study
in Realistic Economics (New York and London: Harper & Brothers,
1936): 27-30, 70, 97. [24] See: Michael J. Boskin and Eytan Sheshinski,
“Optimal Tax Treatment of the Family: Married Couples,” Journal of
Public Economics 20 (1983): 284; Harvey S. Rosen, “Taxes in a
Labor-Supply Model with Joint Wage – Hours Determination,”
Econometrica 44 (May 1976): 485-503; and Glen G. Cain, Married
Women in the Labor Force: An Economic Analysis (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1966): 122.
[25] See: Maher, The Family Portrait.
[26] The evidence here is ably presented in: Brian
Robertson, The Day Care Deception (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2003).
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