Bush was better, but is that enough?

A new McClatchy/Marist poll released earlier this week revealed that 58 percent of those surveyed said the more they hear about Jeb Bush the less they like him. Only 32 percent said the more they hear, the more they like him. His marks were worse than any of the other candidates the pollsters asked about, including Trump.

In fairness to Bush, the poll was taken after his weak performance in the CNBC debate. Will his performance in the November 11 GOP Milwaukee debate change those responses? It is hard to erase a negative impression in opinions and negative impressions of him that have been growing. He did well last night but probably not well enough to undo the growing admiration audiences seem to have for Rubio and Cruz, who are the most eloquent debaters. Carly Fiorina is a sharp debater, too, but her interventions seemed to lack the common touch that Rubio projects so well.

Each candidate had strong moments in the main debate, and Chris Christie outshone the others in the early evening contest. The winner in Milwaukee seemed to be Fox and the Wall Street Journal, news organizations that produced a riveting and substantive exchange.

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The price of free speech in Japan

It’s not just American university campuses that are being roiled by clashes over the limits of free speech. At one of Japan’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, no less than the president himself has just been dismissed by his academic colleagues for publicly supporting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The dispute taps into a deeper national debate over Japan’s future.

A favorite claim of liberal academics and activists is that Japan remains one of the most conservative societies. In recent years, their invective has been directed toward Mr. Abe, who is charged with repressing and intimidating liberal views. Media outlets argue that they have been pressured, and academics warn that government forces are trying to stifle debate about the country’s wartime past.

Yet punishing free speech in Japan is no prerogative of the right. Last week, the president of the prestigious liberal-arts college Doshisha failed to be re-elected due to his support earlier this year of Mr. Abe’s controversial security legislation to relax post-World War II restrictions on the use of the military.

The full text of this article will be posted on Monday, November 16.

 

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How substandard medicines drive antimicrobial resistance

Antibiotic resistance already kills over twenty thousand Americans every year; no one knows the real impact on poorer nations. But estimates of the wider impact are beginning to emerge, and the British government claims that drug resistance will cost 6% of global wealth or roughly $14 trillion by 2050.

In my new paper, I discuss a new cause of this growing problem: substandard medicines.

People walk past a chemist shop at a market in Mumbai, India, June 25, 2015. REUTERS/Shailesh Andrade.

Increasing access to antibiotics for the poor has saved millions of lives but it has accelerated resistance. Indian companies make the cheapest antibiotics on the planet and they deserve huge credit for helping the poor. But some of these companies cut corners in production and make substandard products that positively drive resistance.

My research team finds that roughly 6% of the thousands of antimicrobial medicines we procured in emerging markets are substandard, and about half of these are from India.

There are no simple solutions to this problems, though acknowledging the risks is the first step.

Access the new paper here.

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Concerns over Brexit are not scaremongering

Few sayings encapsulate the attitude of British Eurosceptics towards the European Union better than Groucho Marx’s maxim: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” Witticisms, however, are rarely a good guide to action, especially in a world where no political arrangements, domestic or international, are perfect.

The Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner – probably the most outspoken representative of the British Eurosceptic tradition in Washington – is irked at the latest instance of what he sees as “the meddling by the Obama administration in the internal affairs of the British people.” In a recent article at CapX, he lambasts Michael Froman, the US trade representative, who recently warned that following a potential Brexit, the UK would likely face the same barriers in accessing US market as other countries without a free-trade agreement with the United States.

“The idea that the United States would not sign a free trade agreement with its closest friend and ally, the world’s fifth largest economy, is ludicrous,” responds Mr Gardiner. But is it? It may be worth recalling that, notwithstanding years of negotiations, the United States has not yet signed a free-trade deal with the world’s largest economy and arguably the world’s most significant community of liberal democracies: the European Union.

The reasons are not difficult to comprehend. As tariff barriers and other conventional forms of protectionism hit historical lows, their removal is becoming more and more irrelevant to genuine trade liberalisation. The United States, for example, maintains an average applied tariff rate of just 1.5 percent.

Markets across the Atlantic won’t become more integrated merely by the stroke of a pen abolishing tariffs or quotas. Instead, negotiators need to grapple with complex technical matters. Regulatory barriers can be dismantled by applying the idea of mutual recognition or, alternatively, by harmonising the underlying legal regimes. Complicated intellectual property issues arise in these negotiations, as well as questions of dispute settlement – and all of this is happening against the backdrop of interest groups lobbying vigorously against effective trade liberalisation.

What it means is that, in today’s world, not all free-trade agreements are created equal. The fact that “the US can negotiate free trade deals with Bahrain, Nicaragua and Morocco” says nothing about the market access that the UK would be able to negotiate for itself – especially given the fact that we no longer live in a world of ‘most favoured nation’ clauses, which would enable the UK to piggyback on other, pre-existing, trade arrangements.

The relevant question is not whether the next administration will “snub its nose at Great Britain,” but whether the conditions of an eventual trade agreement would lead to more market integration than the currently negotiated Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Appeals to the ‘special relationship’ aside, the economic gains from to the United States from a comprehensive trade agreement with the UK are much smaller than with the EU as a whole, justifying a proportionately smaller investment of political resources. Moreover, some, such as Dennis Novy from the University of Warwick, add that the UK lacks the administrative capacity to carry on such negotiations better than the EU can.

Any trade negotiations with the United States would be further complicated by the fact that Brexit would be accompanied by protracted negotiations between the UK and the EU, regarding the conditions of the country’s access to the European single market. Irrespective of trade, the regulatory and legal uncertainty would generate costs of its own. London is a global financial capital because financial institutions use it as a gateway to access the EU’s markets. The majority of all EU financial services are conducted through the City of London, a situation that would not be sustainable if the UK was about to make a decisive break with the system of financial services regulation in the EU.

Perhaps the British people should not fear Brexit, as Mr Gardiner advises. But they have legitimate reasons to be concerned, if only because of the uncertainty surrounding its economic effects. While UKIP’s Tim Congdon might claim that the UK is worse off by roughly 11.5 percent of its GDP by being a member of the EU, many economists disagree. Researchers at LSE, for instance, estimate that the Brexit could reduce UK’s national income by as much as 9.5 percent (another LSE paper predicts a reduction of GDP by 1.1 percent under the most optimistic of scenarios).

Even if Brexit does not lead to massive economic dislocations, it is bound to have political consequences. Given the public support enjoyed by EU membership in Scotland, the future of the Union would be unclear. Worse yet, Brexit could be used as a model to follow by populists in other EU countries, typically with weaker democratic traditions. There, the consequences might be far more nefarious than in the UK.

Towards the end of his piece, Mr Gardiner makes a powerful plea for “the United States [to] be on the right side of history.” But America – and America’s defenders of free enterprise – will not be on the right side of history if they become cheerleaders for a collapse of the system of political cooperation in Europe, which has ushered the continent into a historically unprecedented period of prosperity and flourishing of liberal democracy.

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Why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are on the rise

Tuesday night’s Fox Business/Wall Street Journal debate in Milwaukee provided clues as to why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been climbing, not by wide margins but perceptibly, into the top polling positions of the candidates behind the two poll leaders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

The widespread assumption among political insiders is that in crunch time, when things really matter, Republican voters will abandon the front-runners for candidates with experience in public office. That hasn’t happened yet. But if it does, Rubio and Cruz are clearly better positioned than anyone else.

With his smiling demeanor, unhesitant phrasing and ease at pivoting from one point to where he wants to go, Rubio has become a star in debate formats. He parried his first question, about reducing benefits, to how his modest-income immigrant family achieved the American Dream, how higher minimum wages accelerate automation, to his wider economic program and the need for vocational education: “We need more welders and less philosophers.” All in 333 words.

Asked about automation, he said it took 75 years for the telephone but only one year for “Candy Crush” to get 100 million users, a signal that he’s in touch with contemporary tech, and then referenced his plans to reshape higher education, which has been performing especially badly of late.

Later Rubio defended the per-child credit in his tax plan, attacked by some conservatives as doing nothing for growth, by saying his most important role was as a parent and, in a nod to cultural conservatives, “You can’t have a strong nation without strong values, and no one is born with strong values.”

When Rand Paul challenged his plan as non-conservative, Rubio deftly segued to Paul’s weakness, saying that he “is a committed isolationist” and, citing threats from “radical jihadists,” Iran and China, that “we can’t even have an economy if we’re not safe.”

He returned to foreign policy in his next response to Paul, much later, by calling Vladimir Putin a “gangster” who “understands only geopolitical strength,” hailing Israel’s democracy and arguing that radical Islamists who don’t want girls to go to school are on the march.

Near the end of the debate, Rubio interjected briefly on how big government had strengthened, not weakened, the big banks, and how the Dodd-Frank law “codified too-big-to-fail.” He was echoing a point made by Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz, but with an especially memorable phrase. “You know what [the big banks] say to people with a wink and a nod? We are so big, we are so important that if we get in trouble, the government has to bail us out.”

How would he stand up to the more experienced Hillary Clinton? “This election is about the future, and the Democratic Party and the political Left has no idea about the future,” he said. “If I am the nominee, they will be the party of the past and we will be the party of the 21st century.” Rubio’s sunny youthful demeanor and his capacity to discuss policy knowledgeably and appeal simultaneously to cultural, economic and national security interests leads many Republicans to conclude he’d be their strongest candidate against Hillary Clinton.

He also was lucky not to be called on (or smart not to volunteer) in the argument between Trump and Bush immigration or in response to Ted Cruz’s denunciation of the (Rubio-supported) sugar subsidy program. That luck may not hold next time.

Cruz got to talk more than Rubio or anyone else and spoke effectively as well. He was on strong ground in arguing that illegal immigration drives down some wages and that “the rich do great with big government” — a great theme for Republicans next fall. He adopted Walter Bagehot’s 1873 recipe for banks during a panic — large loans at high interest. But he sounded high-risk when he said the money supply “should be tied to a stable level of gold”; the gold standard has not been a winning issue since the 1920s.

“I believe that 2016 will be an election like 1980,” Cruz said, “that we will win by following Reagan’s admonition to paint in bold colors, not pale pastels.” But 2016 is not 1980, and sometimes your colors are too bold.

Of course other candidates remain in the race and Trump and Carson, though they didn’t dominate the dialogue, continue to lead in the polls. But it looks like the choice may boil down to Rubio or Cruz.

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A marriage penalty for the poor

Few issues in American politics are more hotly debated than the role of marriage in explaining poverty. Some argue that the decline in marriage is one of the main contributors to poverty and low-income in America. Others argue that economic and structural factors are more important. But whatever side you come down on, it is hard to justify financially penalizing couples with children who choose to marry.

Yet, in a new study, I find that the earned income tax credit does just that. And expansions being discussed in Washington could make things worse.

I analyzed survey data from actual low-income couples in urban areas and found that marriage penalties in the EITC were much more common than marriage bonuses, with between 42 and 48 percent of couples facing a penalty compared to between 10 and 27 percent receiving a bonus, depending on the number and age of children (the remaining couples experienced no change). And the average penalties were quite large: between $1600 and $2600 in today’s dollars. The bonuses were about half as much.

Several proposals, including one by President Barack Obama and newly elected Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, call for increasing the EITC for workers without dependent children. My analysis, which roughly doubled the childless worker EITC and expanded it to higher income levels, confirmed that an expansion would make the marriage penalty somewhat worse. On average, parents who chose marriage would have been worse off by up to an additional $100 in today’s dollars if a childless worker expansion were in place.

The fact that the EITC, and the income tax code in general, treats married and unmarried parents differently is no secret. Marriage penalties in the EITC occur because married couples must file their taxes jointly and consider their combined income, often placing them above the income-eligible threshold or higher up on the phaseout range.

Unmarried parents, even those who cohabitate, file income taxes separately. Their individual income is used to calculate the EITC, often resulting in a higher EITC than if their income was considered together. However, this depends on the distribution of income between the parents. Because the EITC has phased out more gradually at higher income levels for married couples since 2002, marriage can also generate a larger EITC payment if one parent has little to no income.

Existing research highlights these potential marriage penalties and bonuses in the EITC, but primarily relies on hypothetical situations. Few studies look at actual couples, their income and how the EITC would change if they decided to marry, mainly because survey data that links unmarried mothers and fathers is rare.

I used survey data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study, which is a survey of births in 1998 and 2000 in urban areas. The survey is unique because it oversampled unmarried parents and includes data from both the mother and the father even if they did not live together. Based on reported earnings for both parents, I estimated the EITC when the child included on the survey was 1 and 3 assuming the parents were married and unmarried.

The results confirmed the hypothetical situations: For these parents, marriage penalties in the EITC were real – on average they were quite large – and an expansion to the childless worker EITC would have made things somewhat worse.

Even if the EITC factors little into actual decisions about marriage, these results show real financial penalties for parents with young children who choose marriage. This certainly sends the wrong message from government and may contribute to a culture that minimizes the importance of marriage. Fixing the current situation by completely eliminating the marriage penalty in the EITC would be costly. But at the same time, making the marriage penalty worse by expanding the childless worker EITC seems misguided.

At the very least, if policymakers intend to expand the childless worker EITC, they should also increase the married EITC to match it. And ideally, policymakers would continue discussing how to lessen the overall marriage penalty in the EITC. The government should be on the right side of marriage and not further penalize low-income couples who decide to marry.

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Why political polls are so often wrong

The Real Clear Politics average of polls in the Kentucky governor race, published Oct. 30, showed Democrat Jack Conway leading Republican Matt Bevin 44%-41%. But in the Nov. 3 election Mr. Bevin won 53%-44%. The polls were wrong, election watchers exclaimed, once again. The RCP average of polls just before Kentucky’s 2014 Senate race showed Mitch McConnell ahead of Democrat Alison Grimes, 49%-42%. Mr. McConnell won, 56%-41%.

Kentucky is not the only place where the polls seem to be getting it wrong. The 15 public polls conducted in the week before Britain’s election last May showed the Conservative party leading Labour 34%-33%. Conservatives won the popular vote 38%-31%. The exit poll released at 10 p.m. on election night came closer but projected Conservatives winning 316 seats in the House of Commons, 10 short of a majority. They won 332. Similarly, pre-election polls in this year’s elections in Israel and Argentina seem to have been notably different from actual results.

In all these cases, polls seem to have understated actual support for right-of-center candidates and parties while coming fairly close to actual percentages for those left of center. It may be that some conservative voters, disgruntled with party leaders as poll results indicate, refuse to commit to voting for their parties until election day. Or they may be what in Britain are called “shy Tories,” reluctant to publicly declare themselves because the mainstream media treat conservatism as a stigma.

Continue reading the article at the Wall Street Journal here.

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Donald Trump’s immigration plan would cause U.S. citizens to be deported

“You’re going to have a deportation force.”

 — Donald Trump, Nov. 11

As you heard again during Tuesday’s GOP primary debate, Donald Trump has as a policy goal turning the United States into a police state to facilitate the mass roundup of around 11 million men, women and children who are living in the country unlawfully. He wants to expel them from our borders via a “deportation force.”

His faith in the ability of government to execute this policy — granted, under his tremendous leadership — is (please pardon the repetition) tremendous. It must be said clearly that his plan is morally awful.

Does he understand how his police state would affect the country? Apart from the obvious ways that have been much discussed — breaking up families; a massive disruption for businesses, schools, churches, communities; potentially turning neighbor against neighbor — Trump’s powerful Department of Homeland Security would almost surely end up mistakenly apprehending and detaining U.S. citizens. And probably deporting some of them, too.

Click here to read the full text article.

The full article will appear here on November 19th, 2015.

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Antimicrobial resistance: How substandard medicines contribute

Abstract: 

The possibility of reverting to the pre-antibiotic era is increasing. With dirty hospitals, poor prescribing practices by physicians, and poor patient adherence to correct antibiotic use, the threat was already real. But now an increase in the production of substandard medicines is probably accelerating antibiotic resistance. The UK government predicts that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could cost society a fortune within decades. The threat of AMR is increasing because of poor-quality medications, and India is ground zero when it comes to most of the problems. Given that antibiotics are so cheap in India, antibiotic use is, in effect, a substitute for proper sanitation. It is not surprising that new versions of AMR are now emanating from India. My team’s research shows that at least 6 percent of thousands of antimicrobial medicines sampled from 19 emerging nations are substandard. In nearly every nation, poor-quality medicines made in India were found. Of the substandard products we procured, 40 percent were made by legal and government-protected Indian manufacturers. But India is not the only problem case, and a global effort is required to identify sloppy production and prevent these products from being used.

Read the PDF.

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Antimicrobial resistance: How substandard medicines contribute

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The earned income tax credit and marriage penalties: Does a childless worker expansion make them worse?

Key Points

• The earned income tax credit (EITC) is an effective tool to reduce poverty, but it penalizes marriage. Existing research primarily relies on hypothetical situations to document EITC marriage penalties, with little empirical work exploring penalties based on real-life situations.
• This paper analyzes survey data from low-income parents with young children in urban areas and finds that EITC marriage penalties are more prevalent and larger than marriage bonuses. Expanding the childless worker EITC, as some have proposed, would worsen marriage penalties but by fairly small amounts.
• If enacted, policymakers should at least match the childless worker EITC expansion with a married family expansion and consider additional steps to reduce the overall EITC marriage penalty.

Read the PDF.

The earned income tax credit (EITC) is one of the largest government transfers for low-income families in the United States. In tax year 2013, $68.1 billion was distributed to more than 28 million tax filers.[1] As an antipoverty tool, the program has proved quite effective. The EITC lifted more than six million people out of poverty in 2014.[2]

However, a frequently cited concern about the EITC is that it penalizes marriage. Because of its structure, some low-income couples who share a child can receive a much larger benefit if they are unmarried than if they were to marry. As a result, efforts to reduce the EITC marriage penalty have been incorporated into the federal income tax code since 2002, with the most recent expansion in 2009.

Existing research suggests that concerns about marriage penalties in the EITC may be overly cautious, but more empirical work is needed to identify whether penalties exist when actual—rather than hypothetical—situations are considered. In addition, with proposals to expand the childless worker EITC gaining attention, a better understanding of how an expansion might affect marriage penalties is important. This paper analyzes survey data from a cohort of unmarried parents with young children in urban areas to assess the extent to which EITC marriage penalties are real and the implications of increasing the childless worker EITC for potential marriage penalties.

Background on Marriage Penalties in the EITC

The benefits of marriage for children are well documented. Married households tend to have higher incomes than unmarried households, and this income advantage is associated with better outcomes for children.[3] However, even when controlling for income, children in married families do better. A comprehensive review of the literature in the Annual Review of Sociology in 2013 concluded a causal link between children growing up without a father and adult mental health problems, lower high school graduation rates, and more child social adjustment problems.[4]

Yet, according to the Pew Research Center, more than one-third of children lived with a single parent or with unmarried, cohabitating parents in 2013.[5] This is almost two times the rate of children living outside of marriage in 1980 and four times that of 1960.[6] Because the benefits of marriage are clear, reversing these trends should be an important public policy objective. Reducing marriage penalties in social welfare programs may be part of the solution.[7]

It is no secret that the United States federal income tax system treats married couples differently than unmarried couples, even when they share children.[8] In some ways, the income tax system is more favorable to married couples than unmarried couples, but in other ways it penalizes marriage. The EITC is often cited as a tax expenditure that penalizes marriage.[9]

The EITC provides a refundable tax credit based on the earnings of a tax filing unit. The credit phases in and out at different earnings levels and is more generous for families with children. Married families must file a joint tax return to be eligible for the EITC, and combined spousal income is used to calculate the credit, whereas the earnings of unmarried parents are considered separately in calculating the EITC. Recognizing that this penalizes marriage, Congress changed the EITC in 2002 so it phases out more gradually at higher income levels for married couples, which partially offsets but does not eliminate the penalty.

A childless worker EITC is also available to workers who do not have a resident child. It is much smaller than the family EITC and phases out at lower earnings levels. But it means that unmarried parents can receive both the family EITC and the childless worker EITC depending on the earnings of each parent, whereas married parents cannot.

Proposals to expand the childless worker EITC have received attention in recent years as a way to shore up low wages for workers without dependent children. Most recently, versions of an expansion were included in President Barack Obama’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget and in House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s antipoverty blueprint, which roughly doubles the EITC for childless workers and extends it to higher income levels. While certainly not the goal, the implication of the proposed expansion is that it will likely increase the marriage penalty.

Research has shown that the EITC’s structure can both penalize and subsidize marriage. Unmarried couples who earn similar incomes likely face an EITC penalty if they were to marry. But unmarried couples with disparate incomes might get an EITC bonus for marrying because of the more gradual phase out at higher income levels for married families.

In examining hypothetical situations, Kyle Pomerleau of the Tax Foundation found in 2015 that low-income couples with similar incomes who marry can face tax penalties of up to 12 percent of their income, largely driven by EITC penalties.[10] But couples in which only one person works or one person earns much more than the other can face marriage tax bonuses of up to 20 percent of their income.[11] Others have similarly explored hypothetical EITC marriage penalties based on different income scenarios, typically finding that penalties can be quite substantial.[12]

While marriage penalties based on hypothetical scenarios are helpful to know, better estimates of marriage penalties for real low-income families are also important. In 2005 Gregory Acs and Elaine Maag from the Urban Institute used data from the 2002 National Survey of the American Family to examine unmarried, cohabitating couples. They found that more low-income couples (couples who are under 200 percent of the federal poverty level) would receive tax bonuses if they were to marry than would be penalized, because many couples only had one earner.[13] Although their research examined the tax and transfer system as a whole and not just the EITC, it included marriage penalties and bonuses associated with the EITC. The results suggested that concerns about EITC marriage penalties based on hypothetical scenarios may be overly cautious.

Adding to the debate over the importance of EITC marriage penalties is the extent to which couples actually factor tax benefits or penalties into their decisions around marriage. Qualitative research by Laura Tach and Sarah Halpern-Meekin in 2014 suggested that penalties associated with the EITC factor little into decisions around marriage.[14] Of the individuals they interviewed, few identified the EITC as a reason to marry or stay unmarried, with many citing the idea that the EITC might influence marriage decisions as impractical. However, many identified ways that they manipulate their tax filings to maximize their refunds, suggesting that they are aware of how marriage affects their taxes.

Conversely, Hayley Fisher in 2011 examined the impact of the tax system (not just the EITC) on marriage using data from the Current Population Survey and found that marriage penalties decreased the probability of marriage among cohabitating couples and that low-educated workers were most affected.[15] This suggests that decisions around marriage might well be influenced by the tax system.

But the existing research is far from conclusive. The Acs and Maag study did not focus exclusively on the EITC, and it included only cohabitating couples because it argued that cohabitating couples are more likely to marry than unmarried parents not living together. The authors also included couples with children of different ages. But understanding the EITC marriage penalty for noncohabitating parents and understanding the dynamics of the EITC marriage penalty early after the birth of a child may also be important.

For these reasons, this study explores how the EITC marriage penalty may affect the finances of low-income couples based on their actual reported earnings rather than hypothetical situations. Although this exercise remains speculative, it provides a more complete picture of how marriage penalties associated with the EITC might affect actual low-income parents.

In addition, this study makes two additional contributions to the existing literature. First, it factors in changes to the EITC since 2009 that have reduced the marriage penalty, even though these provisions are set to expire in 2017 unless Congress acts.[16] Second, this study explores implications of the proposed EITC expansion for workers without qualifying children (known as childless workers) on the marriage penalty. These expansion efforts might increase marriage penalties at the same time as provisions to reduce marriage penalties are expiring.

Read the full report.

Notes 

1. US Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, “SOI Tax Stats: Individual Statistical Tables by Size of Adjusted Gross Income,” http://ift.tt/1Kam1ns.
2. Kathleen Short, “The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2014,” US Census Bureau, 2015.
3. Paul Amato, “The Impact of Family Formation Change on the Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Well-Being of the Next Generation,” Future of Children 15, no. 2 (2005).
4. Sara McLanahan, Laura Tach, and Daniel Schneider, “The Causal Effects of Father Absence,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2013): 399–427.
5. Gretchen Livingston, “Less Than Half of US Kids Today Live in a ‘Traditional’ Family,” Pew Research Fact Tank, December 22, 2014, http://pewrsr.ch/1zW782T.
6. Ibid.
7. Douglas Besharov and Neil Gilbert, Marriage Penalties in the Modern Social Welfare State, R Street Policy Study no. 40 (2015), http://ift.tt/1OawK3b.
8. Congressional Budget Office, For Better or for Worse: Marriage and the Federal Income Tax, June 1997, http://ift.tt/1QxqUKm.
9. Hayley Fisher, “Marriage Penalties, Marriage, and Cohabitation” (working paper, University of Sydney Economic Policy, 2011–12), http://ift.tt/1O5jYlj.
10. Kyle Pomerleau, “Understanding the Marriage Penalty and Marriage Bonus,” Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact no. 464 (April 2015), http://ift.tt/1QxqUKo.
11. Ibid.
12. See Besharov and Gilbert, Marriage Penalties in the Modern Social Welfare State; and Elaine Maag and Gregory Acs, The Financial Consequences of Marriage for Cohabitating Couples with Children, Urban Institute, September 2015, http://ift.tt/1O5jYll.
13. Gregory Acs and Elaine Maag, “Irreconcilable Differences: The Conflict between Marriage Promotion Initiatives for Cohabiting Couples with Children and Marriage Penalties in Tax and Transfer Programs,” Urban Institute, New Federalism Series B, no. B-66, April 2005.
14. Laura Tach and Sarah Meekin-Halpern, “Tax Code Knowledge and Behavioral Responses among EITC Recipients, Policy Insights from Qualitative Data,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 33, no. 2 (2014): 413–39.
15. Fisher, “Marriage Penalties, Marriage, and Cohabitation.”
16. Tax Policy Center, “EITC Historical Parameters,” http://ift.tt/1OBWbIL.

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