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Marriage Penalties and Bonuses

By  Nick Kasprak  on May 10, 2015 6:30 PM

I recently had some of my work featured in the New York Times - very exciting. A couple of years ago, towards the end of my stint at the Tax Foundation, I adapted my code for the online tax calculator to produce a chart showing marriage penalties and bonuses for a range of household incomes and circumstances (later adapted into a series of three charts - my last post for them before leaving for CBPP.)

Fast forward to a month ago, when I simultaneously and (as far as I know, completely independently) received similar inquiries from both FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times Upshot blog asking me if these charts would ever be updated. I worked it out with CBPP and TF and was able to reproduce the charts for tax year 2015 and sent the raw data to both reporters.

This resulted in a couple of cool stories: here's the NYT version and here's 538's take. I'm particularly proud of the fact that, at least for a fleeting couple of hours, my work on the front page of the online New York Times: 

A few days later, TF released their own report with the same new charts - at significantly higher resolution (Kyle had a lot more patience than me and let the code run a lot longer.)