Income Splitting (in married peoples’ tax returns)

One of my favorite topics is Anglicisms in the German language. The one I want to write about today is a political issue. It was introduced into the German Tax Code in 1934 by you-know-which-government with the declared intent to discourage married women from working. After a phase of re-writing and re-re-writing it was made part of the West German tax system again by the Adenauer government in 1958. My guess is that this was also the time when the Anglicism was introduced. 

The term came up in the debate this week, because a general tax bill was prevented from becoming law because it contained a section that would have granted income splitting privileges to spouses of the same sex. 

Despite of the fact that equal rights for this group of taxpayers is part of the coalition contract between the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats, the conservative Christian Democrats just could not bring themselves to vote for language that would put gay couples on a par with what they would call “normal” couples. 

On the other hand, if a gay person files for welfare benefits, and they live in a partnership, they will have to prove that their partner cannot support them. 

The rest of the tax bill in question will be passed into law alright, but it will take a lot of committee work, as these things do. Meanwhile German gays will have to wait for another while until they are granted the same rights as everybody else. 

Of course there is also talk of abandoning the principle of income splitting altogether, and instead give more privileges to, say, single parents. Be that as it may, this is an election year, and we are not likely to hear about anyone even thinking about changing entrenched entitlements such as income splitting.

Oh, and one linguistic aspect: in the English language, what is being split is the income. In German, it is the spouses: Ehegatten-Splitting.