Bachelor tax
A bachelor tax is a punitive tax imposed on unmarried men and/or unmarried women. In the modern era, many countries do vary tax rates by marital status, so current references to bachelor taxes are typically implicit rather than explicit; and given the state of tax law is very complicated, as tax accountancy concepts like income splitting can come into play.
Such explicit measures historically would be instituted as part of a moral panic or homophobia due to the important status given to marriage at various times and places, as in the Roman Empire under Augustus' moral legislation or in various U.S. state legislatures in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Frequently, this would be attached to racial policies and/or nationalistic reasons.
More recently, bachelor taxes were viewed as related to tax on childlessness, which were used frequently in the Eastern Bloc by communist member states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.
Rationale
Moral panic and homophobia
During the 19th century in the United States, calls for a bachelor tax were frequently driven by a moral panic, and the bachelor tax was viewed as a way to reform social ills, either because individuals believed that bachelors had a higher rate of delinquency or because they believed that many bachelors were closeted homosexual men.Social and scientific racism
The bachelor tax has a long history of being used for race-based pronatalist policies. In the early 20th century, this morphed into a general discussion of "race suicide", and consequently there was much literature supporting race-based pronatalist policies, typically in the field of eugenics. As an example, the Union of South Africa imposed a bachelor tax upon White South Africans for racial reasons, in order to match their population growth with that of other ethnic groups. After the rise of Fascism in the Kingdom of Italy, the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini explicitly called for the increase of Italian progeny in comparison to other Western European ethnicities in a speech that he delivered on May 26, 1927:Thereafter, the idea of the bachelor tax was passed over to Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and Nazi Germany, discussed in Bulgarian Fascist circles, and became a staple of far-right propaganda in general.