Tax day has come and gone for the year, but I'm still sitting here in a tax funk, a little bitter about it all. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind throwing my fair share of my hard earned money down the rat hole of misappropriated and mismanaged government spending, it's my civic duty.

But, Betty Please and I pay more than our fair share for less benefit, as do most other gay couples in the US, and tax day is just another reminder that we are just a little less equal than others.

I realize that probably most everyone feels screwed by the federal government on tax day, like they are shouldering more than their fair share of the burden, but if you are a married straight couple you probably file one set of federal taxes and one set of state taxes as a joint household. If you use a tax preparation company, you pay one fee. If you do them yourself, you do one household set of taxes for federal and state, and you're done. But, if you are a gay couple and you use a tax preparation company, you pay a fee for each partner to have their taxes done. And if you do them yourself, you have the headache of figuring out for whom it makes the most sense to take which deductions in order to minimize your overall tax burden as couple, and you have the joy of filling our 2 sets of federal tax forms and 2 sets of state tax forms.

So you might be asking, besides having to pay more to the tax prep places and having the headache of figuring out how to divvy up the deductions, what's the big deal about not being able to file jointly. Well, in my house the big deal is about a $3,000 difference. Oh yes, we pay about $3,000 more by having to file as single than if we could file jointly.

Nancy Polikoff, who blogs at Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, says that filing jointly does not benefit those who earn equal wages.

Marriage reduces taxes for couples that have one wage earner, or two wage earners who earn vastly different incomes. In other words, the "traditional" husband-as-wage-earner, wife-as-homemaker family is greatly advantaged by our tax rules. Their "bonus" for being married costs the government $30 billion. When two equal wage earners marry, they pay more taxes. So same-sex couples who marry would simply become a part of this unfair system; those with one primary wage-earner would benefit and those with two more equal wage-earners would lose out.
read full post Tax Time-Not a Reason to Support Marriage Equality.

Perhaps the vast majority of gay couples fall into the equal wage earner category, I somehow doubt it, but I don't know. I also don't know what tax bracket she's talking about. In our case, Betty Please makes about 2/3 again what I make, and the difference is, as I've already stated, $3,000 between us filing as single rather than jointly. But even if I recalculate our taxes using the same total household income, but making us equal earners, the tax burden would still be less if we filed jointly. So, maybe you have to be in the upper-upper middle class for it to be to your disadvantage to file jointly. Or maybe I'm just missing something, which is always a possibility.

Our taxes are pretty straight forward, and not completely complicated. Yet. Diane Silver, who blogs at In This Moment, says

More confusion ensues if couples have to deal with certain expenses, mortgage interest deductions, Roth IRAs, real estate losses or capital gains or losses. Depending on their financial situation and the craftiness of their accountants, same-sex couples can easily end up paying more in taxes than married heterosexuals.
read full post Hope and Politics- What April 15 Teaches Us

To further complicate things, what happens when you throw kids into the mix, as I hope is soon in our future. What if one of us becomes a stay at home mom while the kids are young? A question I need to remember to ask our accountant.

Equal wage earning argument aside, anyone who is lucky enough to be providing health insurance for their partner and/or family through their employer, is still going to get dinged by taxes on the imputed income for health insurance. For those who have never had a reason to know what imputed income is, imputed income for health insurance is the fair market value of the portion of the insurance the employer provides to cover the partner who is not the employee. That amount, the fair market value, is reported as income. So while your actual salary may be $45,000, it gets reported as say $50,000, or whatever the value of the insurance provided by the employer is, but withholding is only done on actual salary. Which means come tax time, it looks like you made $50,000 but only paid tax on $45,000. And just to be clear, this is a federal tax law issue, it has nothing to do with the employer, to whom I am grateful that they offer same-sex partner benefits which are super kick-ass.

In our case, the tax on the imputed income comes out to about $1,000. That's $1000 of tax a year that we wouldn't have to pay if we could file jointly. Not to mention that the portion of BettyPlease's paycheck that goes to pay for her insurance coverage comes out pretax, while the portion that comes out of her paycheck to pay for my insurance is taxed. And, if you have a medical spending account that comes out pretax, as Betty Please does, only the employee can use that spending account, not the partner.

So, $3,000 a year more that we pay in tax than a straight married couple of the same income. Do you know what we could have done with all that extra money we've been paying in taxes? We could have been stimulating the economy. We could have put money in savings. We could have taken a vacation or two. Hell I don't know. All I know is that it's our money. We hold everything jointly, there is no mine and hers, it's all ours. And because we aren't a straight married couple we have to give more of it to the federal and state governments, and it pisses me off. And I haven't even touched on inheritance tax, which makes me even more furious. Cause, yeah, I can see how it's fair that I should have to pay inheritance tax on 50% the value of our house and assets should something happen to Betty Please. What? It makes no sense me. But that's a topic for another time.

While there are things we can do to better protect our futures and our assets, it only makes it some what better, not foolproof, and certainly not equal to marriage. I think Sara Whitman, who writes at Suburban Lesbian Housewife said it best.

Heterosexuals get to say, "I do." All done. No additional legal work required, if a spouse dies, everything is transferred without tax or question. You check the "married" box. The government definition of their marriage is powerful insurance. read full post Tax Time Deliberation: Married or Not?

I couldn't say any better than that.

Check out these bloggers who have also written on this topic.

Paula, posted Tax Day: A Time to Remember Discrimination Gays and Lesbians Face at Queercents.

WittWriterGal, who writes at NOT Available on MySpace, posted Tax Day...Warning this is a cursing rant
(warning loud music plays, can be disabled on in sidebar on right.)

Also see the Advocate article Tax Day 2008: The Cost of Being Gay, by Lara Schwartz