Rachel Cohen has a recent piece in Vox about a conservative welfare reform aimed at removing marriage penalties. This comes up a lot in conservative welfare circles, especially during and after presidential elections. It is doubtful that major policy changes will be made in this area, but it is a topic worth discussing, both in itself and also as a way of illustrating the superiority of a different way of doing tax and welfare policy.

The basic problem is that, whenever you create a welfare benefit that is restricted to families or households with income below a certain level, you make it so that eligibility turns, in part, on how many earners live in a given family or household. If family income needs to be below $20,000 per year to be eligible for a benefit, then a single-earner family earning $15,000 is eligible. But if two single-earners making $15,000 get married, their combined income would go to $30,000 and they would become ineligible for the benefit.

This is distributively unfair and has the effect of preventing some people from marrying. I actually know people in my family who, for many years, cohabitated but didn’t marry because doing so would result in the loss of Medicaid eligibility.