Decentralizing Family: An Inclusive Proposal for Individual Tax Filing in the United States

Our federal tax laws privilege the so-called traditional, nuclear family over all other family arrangements. This privileging is most starkly and easily illustrated by—though in no way confined to—the blatant discrimination against families headed by same-sex couples that permeates our tax laws. To ameliorate this discrimination, recent contributions to the tax literature have proposed establishing variants of a federal domestic partnership regime that would equalize the tax treatment of (1) married different-sex couples and (2) same-sex and unmarried different-sex couples. Although these proposals do chip away at the hegemony of the traditional family, they do nothing to address the tax treatment of other nontraditional family arrangements.

In other words, these proposals accept the privileging of the traditional family in our tax laws, and they attempt only to widen the privileged circle to include certain other relationships patterned after the traditional family norm.