Financially Incentivizing Couplehood and Marriage Needs to Be Re-examined

The single tax is alive and well, and it’s only getting worse

Photo by Andres Ayrton via Pexels

I live in an area of the country that has seen an overwhelming swell in housing prices since the beginning of the pandemic. Rent followed suit. It’s flat-out weird but completely understandable.

We are inundated with people fleeing Southern California in search of lower-cost housing in a still desirable location. On top of that, big investors are buying over 20% of the houses and reselling them at a higher profit.

As a result, we have far more buyers than we can handle and we can’t build homes and apartments fast enough. Couple that with low-interest rates and a pandemic that created a robust remote workforce, and we have hit housing crisis mode.

I’m a single mom on the verge of being an empty nester. I have always thought that when my daughter went off to college, I would shift my career, take a step back, downsize the house, and move to a little apartment someplace funky near downtown.

I’ve run the numbers on my dream. As a single earner, it’s a dismal situation. The reality of what it costs for me to live in the same manner as my…