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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This sentence makes no sense:

"Unlike their ancestors in the late 1800s, many of today’s working-class young adults have responded to the difficulty of marrying by living with a partner and having children outside of marriage."

What difficulty in marrying? I could understand a difficulty in living together and having kids. But marrying? That's just a piece of paper. It makes little difference for people who already have a family together.

I think that people simply don't value that paper - it means little to them except maybe an expense for a large party.

Any analysis of marriage rates should consider people who cohabitatate to be married for the purpose of understanding family trends.

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Or watching your loved one's paycheck be taxed higher because they married you (high income households.) See that they no longer are eligible for certain government programs that they depended on because your combined incomes are just high enough (lower incomes.) Certain low income homes we looked when I was younger looked at households income. No surprise that there were mostly single mothers who lived there.

Or watching your loved one's paycheck be taxed higher because they married you

I'm pretty sure that's not normally how it works. Married couples have the same deduction (well, it's doubled, but they file only one return) and tax rates on a couple are lower:

    Income between 40,000 - 40,050
    Tax if filing single: 5,935
    Tax if married filing jointly: 5,111

    Income between 80,000 - 80,050
    Tax if filing single: 15,935
    Tax if married filing jointly: 11,864

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

Please notice that two single people making $40k each pay $5,935, while one married couple making $80k pays $11,864.

    $5,935 * 2 = $11,870

As for no longer qualifying for low-income grants or programs, most of those take marital status into consideration much like the standard deduction- a family making $10,000 is going to qualify for a lot more than a single person making $10,000

It's actually kind of complicated whether there are benefits or drawbacks to being married. For couples where most of the income comes from one person, there are benefits. For couples with roughly equal incomes, there is a marriage penalty for couples with very high (because the upper tax brackets start at less than twice of the corresponding single tax brackets) or very low (because of EITC) income.

Here a chart that depicts how the effect of marriage on taxes varies with income: http://taxfoundation.org/article/effects-marriage-tax-burden...

You're probably not up to speed with the cultural expectations of the ceremony itself in the modern U.S.

In terms of social signaling, an elaborate, extravagant ceremony, preceded by presentation of an outrageously expensive conflict diamond, is REQUIRED. Even if not in real reality, in the "reality" of social mores and expectations.

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