Commentary

The Head of Household Illusion: the Tax Break That Skips the Mothers It Was Built For

WASHINGTON INFORMER — The head of household filing status, created in 1951, was intended to ease the tax burden for unmarried taxpayers supporting dependents. Although 79% of filers are women, its design benefits higher earners disproportionately, with a taxpayer at the 75th percentile saving significantly more than one at the 25th percentile.

Published

2 months ago

July 11, 2026

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The head of household filing status is popularly understood as a tax break for single mothers, a modest acknowledgment that raising children alone costs more than doing it with a partner. That image is not wrong exactly. Roughly 79% of head of household filers are women, and the status was created in 1951 specifically to ease the tax burden on unmarried taxpayers supporting dependents. Roughly 21 million tax returns claim the status, about 1 in every 7 filed. But the way head of household is designed contradicts the way it is perceived. Rather than targeting need, it distributes its largest benefits to the filers who need it least. And the mismatch is no longer academic, because the status itself is now a target.

Consider income. Drawing on IRS Statistics of Income microdata, researchers found that in 2011 a taxpayer at the 25th percentile of the income distribution filing as head of household saved about $23 a year, while a taxpayer at the 75th percentile saved $1,573, a 68-fold gap. The mechanism is structural rather than incidental. Head of household status works by raising the income thresholds at which higher tax brackets apply, so the benefit accrues only after a filer’s income has climbed above them. Low earners have crossed few or none. The Tax Policy Center estimates that only about 8% of the lowest-income families with children benefit from the status at all, since many owe no federal income tax to offset in the first place.

Race and gender compound this mismatch. The IRS collects no information on filers’ race or sex, which is why this dimension has rarely been measured directly rather than inferred. Census data that simulates tax filing status closes that gap. Black people constitute 25.5% of all head of household filers, roughly 1.8 times their 14% share of the general population. Black filers claiming the status are 84.5% female. Black women alone make up 21.6% of every head of household filer in the country. The group most associated with the policy’s image is overrepresented among its filers, while the design ensures the smallest benefits flow to those with the least income.

This pattern is not new to tax scholarship. In 1996, Moran and Whitford showed that seemingly race-neutral provisions rest on household patterns that are demographically more common among White married couples than Black ones, so a nominally neutral rule produces racially disparate outcomes without ever mentioning race. The pattern begins with marriage itself. As of 2024, 48% of Black adults had never married, compared with 29% of non-Black adults, so a code in which marriage frequently delivers a tax bonus averaging more than $3,000 while the unmarried head of household receives $23 at the bottom of the income scale is not neutral in effect. For Black women raising families on a single income, it is double jeopardy. They are penalized once by a benefit structure that pays the most to the highest earners, and again by a code built around a household form they are statistically least likely to occupy.

Head of household adds a further design flaw to that lineage. Its benefit does not scale with the number of dependents a filer supports. A parent raising 1 child receives the same benefit as a parent raising 4, unlike the Child Tax Credit or the Earned Income Tax Credit. Family size determines how far a household’s income must stretch, and any analysis of how the tax code treats Black families that fails to account for it will get the story wrong.

The political stakes are current rather than historical. Project 2025 called for eliminating the status outright, and a Senate bill drafted by the Niskanen Center would raise taxes on roughly two-thirds of single-parent households to help fund an expanded Child Tax Credit. That trade deserves scrutiny, because the credit as currently designed already leaves out many children in the lowest-income families, whose parents earn too little to receive the full amount. Head of household survived last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the Earned Income Tax Credit shows how little that guarantees. A precertification requirement aimed at the credit was stripped from that same law on procedural grounds, and it is already back on the target list as the next reconciliation package takes shape. Unmarried taxpayers, filing head of household or single, receive roughly three-quarters of all Earned Income Tax Credit dollars, so the credit crackdown and the repeal proposals converge on the same families. Provisions that support single parents do not leave the chopping block. They wait on it.

None of this argues for preserving head of household as it stands. The scholars who documented its regressive design have proposed replacing the status with a flat per-child credit, a reform that would produce net gains for roughly the bottom 4 income deciles. A redesigned benefit should grow with the number of children a parent raises and reach families whose earnings are too low to owe much income tax. The real choice is between redesigning this benefit so that it reaches the single mothers it was named for, and quietly raising taxes on those same women while pointing to a tax break most of them barely receive. Repeal without redesign would fall hardest on Black women, who are 1 in 5 of the filers this status touches. A policy whose image and whose design point in opposite directions cannot be defended by its image alone.

Beverly Moran is professor emerita of law at Vanderbilt University. LaToya B. Parker, PhD, directs the Tax Policy and Wealth Program at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Based on reporting by Washington Informer.

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OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — “Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.”

Published

6 days ago

August 20, 2026

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OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology - City Limits

Every indicator in New York City’s housing market is pointing in the wrong direction.

Rents are at historic highs. Foreclosure notices are climbing in Black and brown neighborhoods that never fully recovered from the last crisis. Deed theft, the predatory stripping of generational wealth from families who built their equity over decades, continues to devastate communities from Brownsville to Jamaica.

On top of all these factors, there were more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sitting completely empty as of April last year. That number grew by 8,000 units in a single year, with the sharpest increases hitting Brooklyn and Queens hardest.

Brooklyn and Queens. My neighborhoods. Your neighborhoods.

You would think that news of 57,000 empty affordable apartments in the middle of a housing emergency would produce outrage, emergency hearings, and demands for accountability. Instead, New Yorkers got a collective shrug from opinion leaders.

Read that again: 57,000 families could be housed in those apartments. Households currently paying market rent, doubled up, couch-surfing, or one missed paycheck away from the street could have relief. And silence from the city’s housing leadership, activists, and coalitions.

In my experience as chair of the Subcommittee on Affordable Housing in the Assembly, that is not advocacy. That is surrender.

These are the same voices, the same institutions, the same political class that successfully lobbied to effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City through Local Law 18. At its peak, Airbnb had roughly 20,000 listings in New York City, nearly a third the number of apartments currently sitting vacant and padlocked in the rent-stabilized system. The campaign against those listings was relentless, loud, and wrapped in the language of affordability and housing justice.

Where is that energy now?

Where are the press conferences about landlords warehousing stabilized units while families sleep in shelters? Where is the legislation with teeth? Where is the outrage that was apparently plentiful when a Black homeowner in Bed Stuy wanted to rent out her spare bedroom to make ends meet?

Because that is exactly who Local Law 18 hit hardest. Not the corporate bad actors. Not the hedge funds. The struggling homeowner, disproportionately Black, disproportionately in Brooklyn and Queens, who used their home as a small economic engine to survive in a city that grows more expensive by the month.

Those families were told their activity was destabilizing the housing market. Those families were fined, delisted, and legislated out of a livelihood. And now we learn that 57,000 stabilized units are sitting empty while rents spiral and foreclosures mount, and the response from housing advocates is essentially: that’s just how big numbers work.

This is not sound policy. This is politics. And the communities paying the price know the difference.

I have spoken with homeowners across Central Brooklyn who are barely holding on. They bought their homes, sometimes one generation removed from the Great Migration, and they have watched the equity they built become both their greatest asset and their greatest vulnerability. Predatory lenders, deed theft schemes, and rising property taxes all circle that equity like wolves.

Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.

Everyone in this fight knows what needs to happen but will not say it out loud: Local Law 18 needs reform. Common sense reform. The kind that distinguishes between an investor running a ghost hotel and a homeowner renting a room. The kind that actually targets bad actors instead of penalizing the most economically vulnerable property owners in the city.

I hear it in private conversations with elected officials, with housing attorneys, with planners. The consensus is there. The political will is not, because the same advocacy groups and political donors who pushed the original law are still in the room, and nobody wants to take their call.

What this moment requires is courage, not calculation.

Every month that passes with 57,000 empty stabilized apartments is a month of families in crisis, of shelter costs ballooning, of neighborhoods destabilizing. Every month that Local Law 18 remains unreformed is another month a Black homeowner in Flatbush or Hollis faces impossible choices that wealthier New Yorkers simply never have to make.

You cannot ban the small and ignore the large. You cannot mobilize armies of lobbyists against a homeowner’s spare bedroom while shrugging at tens of thousands of warehoused affordable units. You cannot claim to stand for housing justice and then tell 57,000 families worth of empty apartments that the math just works out this way.

The hypocrisy has to stop. Politics have to give way to people. And the officials and advocates who have the power to fix this, who know what needs to be done, have to decide which side they are actually on.

Because from where I stand, in the communities I have served for decades, it is very clear who is being left out in the cold.

Dr. Annette Robinson is a former member of both the State Assembly and City Council in Brooklyn.

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Black History

Oakland Protesters Rally to Defend Haitian Immigrants and TPS

The Haiti Action Committee traces its roots to the international movement that emerged following Haiti’s 1991 military coup, which overthrew the nation’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Political violence sent thousands of Haitians fleeing the country, while U.S. policies resulted in refugees being intercepted at sea, repatriated, or detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Published

6 days ago

August 20, 2026

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Activists Gerald Smith and Romaine Charite at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland near City Hall protest in support of Haitian immigrant rights. Photo by Carla Thomas

By Carla Thomas

Protesters gathered in downtown Oakland near City Hall at 14th Street and Broadway on Thursday, Aug. 13, calling for protections for Haitian immigrants and an end to deportation policies affecting Haitian communities across the United States.

Organized as a call to action by the Legalization for All Network and supported by the Haiti Action Committee and other community organizations, the demonstration carried a clear message: “Defend TPS! Legalization, Not Deportation!”

Participants focused attention on the termination of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haiti and immigration policies protesters described as continuing attacks on Haitian immigrants under the Trump administration.

Haitian Romaine Charite of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization urged demonstrators to stand with Haitian families and led chants:

“When Haitians are under attack, what do we do? We fight back.”

Injustice to one is an injustice to us all.”

“Dump Trump!”

Charite and other protesters condemned the federal government’s treatment of Haitian immigrants, describing the policies as an attack on a population already facing extraordinary hardship.

Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated effective July 27, 2026, removing temporary deportation protections and work authorization for hundreds of thousands of Haitian beneficiaries who lacked another legal basis to remain in the United States.

Gerald Smith, a protester and former member of the Black Panther Party during the 1970s, said Haitians were being unfairly targeted and warned that ending TPS would have a devastating impact on Haitian families and communities.

“These policies are racially motivated and unfair,” Smith said. “Everyone deserves the right to self-determination and protection from persecution.”

The Haiti Action Committee cited the continuing political, economic and humanitarian crisis in Haiti as evidence that returning large numbers of immigrants to the country could place already vulnerable people at greater risk.

The Oakland gathering, which drew about 20 participants, reflected a decades-long history of Bay Area activism surrounding Haitian democracy, refugee rights and U.S. immigration policy.

Those policies sparked protests involving Haitian communities, Black activists, artists, college students, churches, labor organizations and human rights advocates. Prominent figures, including dancer and activist Katherine Dunham, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and TransAfrica leader Randall Robinson, joined campaigns challenging the treatment of Haitian refugees.

In 1992, Haiti Action Committee joined other Bay Area organizations in a dramatic demonstration on San Francisco Bay. Boats carrying Haitian participants were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard while supporters gathered along the waterfront and reportedly chanted, “Let Them Land!”

More than three decades later, protesters have returned to the streets of Oakland, centering on protecting Haitian immigrants, opposing deportation and pressing for immigration policies that provide families with a pathway toward permanent legal residency.

For more information, visit Haitisolidarity.net.

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Commentary

From Palestine to Oakland: Seeds for Liberation Examines Shared Struggles for Freedom

The screening was hosted by the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America and the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. Following the film, director Matthew Solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.

Published

6 days ago

August 20, 2026

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Documentary film, "Seeds for Liberation," highlights the Palestinian struggle and the shared fight for freedom and liberation in the United States and abroad. Graphic courtesy of www.seedsforliberationmovie.com

By Carla Thomas

Community members gathered at the Black Panther Party Museum on Saturday, Aug. 15, in downtown Oakland for a screening of “Seeds for Liberation,” an award-winning documentary examining the Palestinian liberation movement and its connections to Black, Chicano and other movements for collective liberation.

The film reveals the face of conflict, struggle, and injustice today and yesterday. In one scene, a bleeding child pleads for help on a shell-shattered rooftop after a bombing in the Gaza Strip last year. In another scene, newly freed Nelson Mandela addresses thousands at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990, at the end of apartheid.

Directed by Solomon and executive-produced by Donna Hadjikhani and Alana Hadid, “Seeds for Liberation” situates Palestinian experiences within the broader history of anti-imperialist and decolonial movements.

Through interviews with historians, legal scholars, activists and organizers, the documentary examines Palestinian resistance. It also details the role of social media in shaping the public’s understanding of the impact of Palestine’s 77-year occupation by Israeli forces, events in Gaza and the West Bank, and relationships between liberation movements across generations and geographic boundaries.

The film includes perspectives of people connected to the Black Liberation Army, La Raza Unida and the Stop Cop City movement. Those featured talk about colonialism, U.S. foreign policy, policing, racial justice and their views of what solidarity with Palestinians has meant.

Solomon developed the documentary following his previous film, “Reimagining Safety,” which explored alternatives to traditional policing.

“I use film as a medium to connect personal testimony with larger social and political questions,” said Solomon, who is currently touring the film across the nation as well as Canada and other countries.

Executive producer Hadjikhani brought a personal connection to the project. An Iranian American designer and social justice advocate, she traveled to Gaza and the West Bank as a college student in 1993 during the First Intifada. Hadid has since focused on Palestinian stories and other underrepresented voices.

The Oakland screening carried added historical significance because it was held in the Black Panther Party Museum, where the history of Black resistance and community organizing provided a backdrop for the film’s examination of interconnected struggles.

Activist and artist Cat Brooks passionately spoke about the fight for the freedom of all people. “No one is free until everyone is free,” she said.

Brooks played a key role in the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant, who was gunned down by a BART police officer in 2009 and is co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), whose mission is to rapidly respond to and ultimately eradicate state violence in communities of color.

Rather than treating liberation movements as isolated chapters, “Seeds for Liberation” asks audiences to consider how movements separated by time, race and geography have influenced one another and how solidarity has continued to evolve across generations.

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