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发帖数: 450 | 1 What price singledom? Try a million dollars.
More on Shine: 6 Questions to Ask if You're Still Single
Yep. Beyond the indignities of bridesmaid dresses and hastily hatched setups
by well-meaning married friends, it seems that being single has become a
luxury. That's according to an analysis of U.S. Federal Tax Code published
in the Atlantic on Monday, which finds singles are at a disadvantage,
financially, over a lifetime.
"More than 1,000 laws provide overt legal or financial benefits to married
couples," write story authors Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell, whose blog
Onely: Single and Happy provides "Fresh Perspectives on Living Solo."
More on Yahoo!: Gay Marriage Case: Financial Benefits at Stake
"Marital privileging marginalizes the 50 percent of Americans who are single
," they continue. "The U.S. government is the main perpetrator, but private
companies follow its lead. Thus marital privilege pervades nearly every
facet of our lives."
For the piece, Arnold and Campbell—who describe themselves as "not callous
and repressed man-haters"—conjured two single women, earning $40,000 and $
80,000 a year, and two married women of equivalent means, all living in
Virginia. And, after doing exhaustive calculations in areas of income taxes,
social security, IRAs, housing and health spending (and taking various
liberties), they came to the following conclusions: Being single cost the
lower-paid woman $484,368 over a 60-year lifetime, and a whopping $1,022,096
for the higher earner.
Arnold and Campbell explain that a 2009 New York Times story inspired their
own. In that piece, reporters Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber compared a
hypothetical married couple to an unmarried gay couple, finding a
significant lifetime cost of being gay: $41,196 at best and $467,562 at
worst. They pointed out that the discrepancy was an argument in favor of
legalizing gay marriage.
"But in fact, legalizing gay marriage only solves the problem for a few,"
Arnold and Campbell write. "Many more single people (gay and straight)—more
than half of the population—continue to suffer from institutionalized
singlism, the discrimination of individuals based on marital status."
Though they expect that their calculations will be the target of criticism—
and they have been, looking at the nearly 200 online story comments—the
writers say their estimates were "conservative," and that they can come to
only one conclusion: "Singles get screwed." |
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