ABSTRACTThis article attempts to demonstrate how the community subsidizes a married couple in which the wife stays at home, through the combined effect of tax and social security privileges. Contrary to what might be thought, this system is not even really designed to protect ‘the family’: it operates irrespective of whether there are any children or not. It is in fact intended to reward the couple in which the wife devotes herself to looking after her husband. It is quite likely that women who go out to work (and who also do their housework) bear more than their share of the cost of this, because of the ‘overpayments’ that they are obliged to make in taxation and social security contributions. I propose that the system be abolished, as it corresponds to an out-of-date concept of marriage and has no justification from either the economic or the social standpoint. A housewife receives an income from her marriage and, if she actually does the housework, she improves the couple's standard of living. A number of working hypotheses are put forward in an attempt to see how the housewife could assume the normal responsibilities of a taxpayer and social security contributor.It is impossible (a) to assess the value of the services provided by the housewife in her sheltered environment and (b) even to know for certain what she really does there (many housewives employ charwomen or au pair girls or even full-time servants). However, when it is a question of granting to a widow an income related to what she had when her husband was alive, she is entitled to a specified fraction – usually half – of what her husband received or would have received. If this principle is valid with respect to benefits, it ought also to be valid with respect to obligations. Thus, the main proposal made here is that the housewife should pay income tax and social security contributions on a fictitious amount equivalent to half of her husband's earnings; this amount would be treated as ‘earned income’, which is the most favourable assumption from her standpoint. At the same time, the husband would pay income tax and his own social security contributions on the whole of his own earned income, as he would if he employed a housekeeper. The above-mentioned fictitious amount would also serve as the basis of calculation of the housewife's entitlement to social security benefits, subject to redistribution so as to assure a minimum subsistence in case of need. Reforms along these lines could only be put into effect gradually, since it would be unjust to penalize people from one day to the next for irresponsible behaviour which they have been deliberately encouraged to adopt up to the present.
