Decentralizing Family: An Inclusive Proposal For Individual Tax Filing in the United States

I. INTRODUCTION Our federal tax laws privilege the so-called traditional, nuclear family over all other family arrangements. This privileging is most starkly and easily illustrated by— though in no way confined to—the blatant discrimination against families headed by same-sex couples that permeates our tax laws.[1] To ameliorate this discrimination, recent contributions to the tax literature have proposed establishing variants of a federal domestic partnership regime that would equalize the tax…