What Price Virtue?

The Joint Congressional Committee that wrote the 1969 tax reform bill was aware of the possibility. But only now, as the first full season of preparing tax returns under the new law has descended, is the price of virtue coming straight home to American taxpayers. For a husband and wife who both work and have relatively similar incomes, the new rules offer what amounts to a cold-cash invitation to divorce.

One such couple is John and Kathryn McGrath of Washington, D.C. They are both attorneys, he with a private law firm, she for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Working out their 1971 return, they discovered that they would save approximately $1,000 in taxes if they could file as singles rather than as marrieds. With that, Mrs. McGrath fired off a wry letter to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills, complaining that "the U.S. Congress has provided us with a strong economic incentive to obtain a divorce and thereafter to live more prosperously in sin."

Mills' staffers admit the inequity, but insist that it was the inevitable result of giving a fairer break to single people. Mrs. McGrath's reply is that marrieds should simply be given the option of filing as if they were single. Otherwise, she says, "that $1,000 could finance a trip to Haiti for a quick divorce, and we'd have a vacation thrown in, too."

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