Bachelor tax
Punitive tax imposed on unmarried men
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Through Modern era, Marriage and Roman Empire
Such explicit measures historically would be instituted as part of a moral panic or homophobia due to the important status given to marriage at various times and places, as in the Roman Empire under Augustus' moral legislation or in various U.S. state legislatures in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Frequently, this would be attached to racial policies (e.g., as part of the Apartheid legislation) and/or nationalistic reasons (as in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany).
More recently, bachelor taxes were viewed as related to tax on childlessness, which were used frequently in the Eastern Bloc by communist member states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War (1945–1990).
Timeline
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Rationale
Moral panic and homophobia
During the 19th century in the United States, calls for a bachelor tax were frequently driven by a moral panic, and the bachelor tax was viewed as a way to reform social ills, either because individuals believed that bachelors had a higher rate of delinquency or because they believed that many bachelors were closeted homosexual men.
Social and scientific racism
The bachelor tax has a long history of being used for race-based pronatalist policies. In the early 20th century, this morphed into a general discussion of "race suicide", and consequently there was much literature supporting race-based pronatalist policies, typically in the field of eugenics. As an example, the Union of South Africa imposed a bachelor tax upon White South Africans for racial reasons, in order to match their population growth with that of other ethnic groups. After the rise of Fascism in the Kingdom of Italy, the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini explicitly called for the increase of Italian progeny in comparison to other Western European ethnicities in a speech that he delivered on May 26, 1927:
Let us be quite clear: what are 40 million Italians compared to 90 million Germans and 200 million Slavs? What are 40 million Italians compared to 40 million Frenchmen, plus 90 million inhabitants of their colonies, or 46 million Englishmen plus 450 million people who live in their colonies?
Thereafter, the idea of the bachelor tax was passed over to Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and Nazi Germany, discussed in Bulgarian Fascist circles, and became a staple of far-right propaganda in general.
Communist family planning
Some communist member states of the Warsaw Pact instituted similar forms of a bachelor tax, such as the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. Typically, it formed a part of socialism-based pronatalist policies, taxes on childlessness, and Soviet-based family planning policies that were instituted in communist countries at around the same time in order to increase falling fertility rates.
Present day
Today, bachelor taxes have for the most part been superseded by the inclusion of marital status in the tax code. The first distinction in marital status as part of an income tax happened in the U.S. by 1930 after Poe v. Seaborn, where "income-splitting" was allowed in community property states. Therefore, until 1948, tax rates amongst married and bachelors differed based on one's state of residence. This disparity lead to joint-filing status being allowed by U.S. Federal tax law in 1948 to attempt to harmonize the tax code between community property and common law states. In the aftermath of World War II, joint filing and marital status began to be incorporated instead of explicit bachelor taxes into the U.S. tax system and soon spread to other tax systems around the world.
Effects
According to a 2010 study in the Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, the utility of the tax has been mixed, as analysis of past historical episodes have questioned the reliability of the tax to results in pronatalist outcomes. In Fascist Italy, it was found to be ineffective, as birth and marriage rates actually decreased. In the Soviet Union, the effect on the fertility rate of the policy was likewise inconclusive; and it was also found to be fairly regressive, as it tended to hit rural, poorer bachelors hardest. However, modern day implementations of taxation based on marital status in the U.S. has found a positive correlation with marriage rate.