In an effort to encourage people to get married, Santorum has proposed eliminating head-of-household exemptions for unmarried parents, while tripling their value for married parents. "We shouldn't have incentives for people not to be married," he said in October.First and foremost, this simply isn't true. Having recently filed my taxes, I have my paperwork handy.
In order to qualify for a Head of Household status, one has to be single and caring for others, which includes not only children and foster children, but also parents, step-parents...basically anyone that lives in your household and depends on your income for their living expenses.
The Standard Deduction for Head of Household is $8,500. The Standard Deduction for Married Filing Jointly is $11,600. The Standard Deduction for Single or Married Filing Separately is $5,800.
The quote left me under the impression that the Head of Household deduction would be greater than the Married Filing Jointly. Of course, it's not. If someone were looking for incentives based on tax code, the incentive to be married filing jointly is certainly greater than to care for others as a single person!
If anyone thinks that $2,700 (the difference between the Single Standard Deduction and the Head of Household Standard Deduction) is enough to raise two children (or care for one or more of their elderly parents), they clearly have not looked at the price of milk in the last 80 years. Or diapers or clothes or school supplies. Here in SoCal, it doesn't even pay the rent for the additional bedroom!
The average cost of raising one child per year is nearly $14,000.
So if you're single and wishing you could get that extra $2,700 in tax deductions: just say no. That "incentive" is not nearly enough to get the job done.
If you want to devote yourself to the care of another human being, if you want to hold a crying baby for hours, if you want to see how inventive you can be during emergency diaper situations, stand in line for hours at the kiddie roller coaster, at pre-school registration, at Back to School Nights, buying school supplies at Target, in the waiting room at doctor's offices and emergency rooms, decipher text shorthand, answer the question "what's for dinner?" ten billion times, go through 10 thermometers and 4 lamp shades in 3 years, get thrown up on in the middle of the night, get woken up to hugs and kisses (or tears), feel the truest, deepest love that could ever exist and bear witness (and responsibility) for being there for someone's entire life...and spend over $200,000 dollars in 18 years...then by all means, take that $2,700 deduction as the SMALL token it is once a year for a job well done.
5 comments:
I happily take that deduction for all it's worth ... which monetarily isn't much!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
He's such an idiot. Marriage is not the be-all, end-all of existence. And I wonder how many abused women he's putting down by saying people should be married. Sheesh.
I love that Santorium wants to pick on single moms, what about the fathers that leave the families. I swear this group of Republican candidates seem to hate women. I would be surprised if the want to repeal the 19th admendment
Santorum is out of touch with reality...lots and lots of single parents (moms mostly, but dads too) are excellent parents and the children are actually being raised in a better environment because the toxis marriage/relationship ended.
He'll never get my vote.
Don't even get me started... (I've been more political on my site in the past few months than ever... I feel like we've time traveled back to some warped version of the 1950s in some minds... )
As for the $14,000 figure - we also need to remember that's an average. The "actual" amounts are highly dependent on location, age and health of child, special needs if any, whether or not the parent is employed (which would allow for medical coverage of the child, theoretically), and so on.
Land of the free, home of the brave, right?
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