David Weldon: “The Tax Code, as everybody knows, is very complicated and so is knowing how to repair it so that it is not a Tax Code…”

“The Tax Code, as everybody knows, is very complicated and so is knowing how to repair it so that it is not a Tax Code that encourages people to live out of wedlock, how do we repair it to make sure it is not a Tax Code that discourages marriage. I first became interested in this subject actually years before I got elected to the U.S. House when I was still practicing medicine, and I had people coming in my office who I knew were living together physically as husband and wife, but they had different last names, not because the wife chose to keep her maiden name, but because they had actually not married. Some of these individuals were senior citizens, which was another thing that amazed me. They knew when I talked to them about this issue, they knew they were setting a bad example for their grandchildren, living out of wedlock together, but always it was the same story. 'If we get married, our tax burden would go up so much, that we live together out of wedlock.' To me, in my opinion, this is a moral issue. This is an example of how our laws in Washington encourage a bad thing.”