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The world’s most mysterious psychedelic is already inside your brain

DMT, “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family,” explained.


by Oshan Jarow
 Dec 7, 2024
VOX
Future Perfect

LONG READ


JooHee Yoon for Vox


There’s often a threshold for how weird something can sound beyond which most people stop taking it seriously. One of the quickest ways to kill a conversation, for example, is to start telling someone about that strange dream you had. Perhaps an even more surefire way to land on the far side of that threshold is to tell them about your trip on one of the most bizarre, powerful, and under-studied psychedelic drugs: DMT, or, if you speak chemistry, N,N-dimethyltryptamine.

Tales of hyperdimensional worlds populated by various intelligent creatures — tiny machine elves eager to teach you the universe’s secrets or giant praying mantises that seem to harvest human emotions — are commonplace in DMT trip reports.


Because these trips are so bizarre, even compared to other psychedelics, DMT has largely lived on the fringes of the ongoing revival in psychedelic research and therapy. Ketamine clinics are spawning left and right. MDMA therapy teeters on the brink of government approval. Legal psilocybin centers are set to open across multiple states. But DMT, once called “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family” by Harvard psychologist and psychedelic hype-man Timothy Leary, has lagged pretty far behind in mainstream attention and scientific interest


That’s slowly starting to change. “We unashamedly think there’s value here, beyond the weird stuff,” neuroscientist Chris Timmermann, who leads the DMT Research Group at Imperial College London, told me. Like its more conventional psychedelic counterparts, DMT could play a role in psychedelic therapy, offering a new treatment for conditions ranging from depression to cluster headaches — and it could even serve as a kind of rocket fuel for the science of consciousness.


The compound naturally occurs in a variety of mammals and plants. “DMT is everywhere,” wrote chemist Alexander Shulgin, who created nearly 200 psychedelics through the late 20th century. Humans have been ingesting a slow-acting form of it for at least a few hundred, and perhaps thousands of years by boiling DMT-containing vines and leaves to make the psychoactive brew ayahuasca. But scientists didn’t figure out how to isolate, extract, and ingest pure DMT on its own until 1956, which branched the drug off from ayahuasca into its own history.


On high doses of DMT, the self does not disappear. Instead, the self feels largely intact, but transported to alternate worlds reconstructed out of the chaos.


If Timothy Leary was the “high priest of LSD” in the 1960s, the eccentric philosopher Terrence McKenna became DMT’s rhapsodic bard a generation later. “My entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me,” McKenna recalled of his first trip. “All this stuff was just so weird and so alien and so un-English-able that it was a complete shock — I mean, the literal turning inside out of my intellectual universe.”


Terrence McKenna. San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Like other psychedelics, DMT was pushed underground when President Richard Nixon outlawed it in 1970. Well before today’s psychedelic renaissance, it was research on DMT’s hallucinogenic effects led by psychiatrist Rick Strassman in the early 1990s that marked the first return of legal psychedelic research.

In the decades since, other psychedelics have claimed the spotlight, but in the last few years, DMT research has shown hints of a resurgence. The drug’s unique properties may make it both a more convenient therapy and a more powerful tool for studying the mind than its trippy counterparts: While psilocybin or LSD trips run for several hours, a DMT trip winds down after just 20 minutes, and unlike with other psychedelics, users don’t build up a tolerance to DMT that diminishes its impact.

Related:The psychedelic renaissance is at risk of missing the bigger picture


DMT’s propensity to construct rich alternate realities in the minds of its users can also help push the study of consciousness into new terrain. The drug puts the mind’s ability to create immersive, convincing models of the world on full display — the very same thing our minds do during ordinary consciousness (and dreams). And if DMT can simulate that process in a quick and controllable way, then studying the mechanics of DMT trips could help us learn more about the construction of our sober minds, too.


Still, even with all the world’s research funding and best scientific minds, we may never be able to truly “explain” what happens under the influence of this peculiar molecule — but there’s certainly more to know than we do now. So to the woefully incomplete degree that’s currently possible, here’s the news on DMT as we know it today, in not-quite-all of its curious and under-studied glory.

When pure DMT hit the scene


Pure DMT was first synthesized in 1931 but was set aside, leaving its effects unknown. It wasn’t until 1956 that the first straight DMT hit was reported. Hungarian pharmacologist Stephen Szára had wanted to study LSD, but upon requesting some from the Swiss Sandoz Laboratories, which had been supplying to psychiatrists in the 1950s, he was denied. Communist governments scared them enough, but communists with acid? That was too risky.


No matter, thought Szára. He pored over the existing psychedelic literature, found research identifying DMT as an active ingredient in longstanding psychedelic drinks of the Amazon, extracted it from the Mimosa hostilis plant, and became the first person to describe what happens when you take a hit.


The DMT molecule, in all of its mundane molecular glory Lena Gadanski/Getty Images


From his Budapest laboratory, Szára reported “brilliantly coloured oriental motifs and, later, wonderful scenes altering very rapidly.” Immediately after, he recruited volunteers from his hospital to try the strange drug. In these first DMT trials throughout the late 1950s, participants reported rooms “full of spirits” and “curious objects.”


“DMT is the most efficient reality-switching molecule currently known to exist”— Andrew Gallimore


Rumors of the immensely powerful, conveniently short-lasting psychedelic began to spread through the 1960s counterculture (famously, they were pretty into mind-altering drugs). By 1962, word of DMT reached Timothy Leary, who was then researching psychedelics at Harvard. He ran experiments that applied his idea of carefully crafting the “set and setting” of a trip — focusing on how everything from a room’s lighting to one’s preexisting cultural ideals shape the psychedelic experience — to DMT. Though Leary’s experiments successfully nudged them toward increasingly positive experiences, DMT trips remained indelibly weird and never rose to the level of LSD among the counterculture’s preferred vehicles for exploring altered states of consciousness. When it was outlawed under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, the modest interest that remained was largely put on ice.


The freeze lasted until the early 1990s, when Strassman managed to jump through the heap of regulatory hoops to carry out legal DMT research at the University of New Mexico, making DMT the origin of today’s revival in psychedelic science. He went on to publish a book in 2000 that dubbed DMT “the spirit molecule,” which was later adapted into one of the most-viewed documentaries on Netflix, starring podcaster Joe Rogan.

Related:MDMA therapy didn’t get FDA approval. Now what?


Still, DMT remained concentrated more on podcasts and internet forums than in the medical and therapeutic highways toward mainstream acceptance like MDMA and psilocybin. High-profile psychedelics research — like much of neuroscientist Roland Griffiths’s work at Johns Hopkins or studies funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) — has tended to focus on psilocybin or MDMA. By 2019, the world’s first dedicated academic center for psychedelic science opened at Imperial College London, where Timmermann was finishing up his PhD on the neuroscience of DMT. After advising a few PhD students also working on DMT, he figured, “Let’s make this into a group and focus our energies into understanding [DMT] from a consciousness perspective,” launching the university’s DMT Research Group in 2022.


Now, Timmermann said, “there’s definitely traction here. And the way to develop that is by doing good science.”

What it’s like to take DMT


Now, the fun stuff. Neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore, author of a forthcoming book on the history and science of DMT, Death by Astonishment, has called it “the most efficient reality-switching molecule currently known to exist, almost instantaneously transporting the tripper from the Consensus Reality Space to a bizarre hyperdimensional omniverse teeming with superintelligent entities of every (un)imaginable form and character.”


We’ll get to all that, but let’s move slowly.


Recreationally, most people smoke DMT either from a pipe or, especially nowadays, a vape pen. The effects kick in within a few seconds, before you can even exhale the first hit. All psychedelic experiences are dose dependent — a gram and a half of dried mushrooms might as well be a different drug than 5 grams — and with DMT in particular, ascending doses lead not just to more intense experiences, but to different kinds altogether.


There’s no agreed upon “map” of what psychonauts (self-experimenters who explore altered states of consciousness) call the “DMT space.” Different people slice it up in different ways, with varying degrees of detail. Some taxonomies have six levels, with names like “The Magic Eye Level” and “The Waiting Room.” Others have mapped out four-step ladders. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to zoom out as much as possible and cram the weirdness of DMT trips into three simple categories: low, medium, and high doses.


At low doses, the onset of DMT feels similar to other psychedelics. Colors grow more vivid, your body may tingle, the world appears a bit crisper, as though the contrast and saturation have been dialed up. A portentous, ambient sense of meaning begins to set in, what’s been called the “noetic quality” of psychedelic trips.


Read more about the mystery of psychedelics
The biggest unknown in psychedelic therapy is not the psychedelics
Why psychedelics produce some of the most meaningful experiences in people’s lives
Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world


At medium doses, that vivid picture of the world begins to dissolve into classically psychedelic imagery: swirling geometric patterns, flashing colors and shapes, and a general deconstruction of ordinary perception into chaos. Your ordinary sense of self, too, while not obliterated or dissolved, will likely begin to lose its familiar anchors in space and time.


Then there are high, or “breakthrough,” doses (around 20–30 milligrams and up), where the distinctly DMT-flavored weird stuff starts to happen. The incoherent imagery of a medium dose snaps into a new kind of coherence, reconstructing a very high-definition world, albeit one that looks entirely different from what we’re familiar with. When people talk about exploring other dimensions on DMT, it’s this dose they’re talking about.


“If the dose is sufficient … the user bursts through a kind of membrane into an entirely novel domain unlike anything within this universe,” as Gallimore put it. “The most striking feature of this ‘DMT space’ is its structure, often described as ‘hyperdimensional.’” In our normal states of consciousness, human perception tends to see space as flat, even though, ever since Einstein’s theory of relativity, we’ve known that mass bends space and time. Some consciousness researchers believe that on high doses of DMT, perception takes on this kind of curvy geometry. That could help explain why the experiences are so strikingly unusual, and why it’s so hard to describe them back in our sober minds.


But since DMT trips only last a few minutes, people often feel that they’re pulled out of the oddly curved DMT worlds right as they begin to find their bearings, or, as we should probably now get into, before they can finish their conversations with the entities.

We do need to talk a bit about the DMT entities


One of the strangest things about these breakthrough doses are the entities. “I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences,” Strassman wrote of his DMT experiments in the ’90s.

Not everyone meets entities on DMT, but it happens often enough that it seems like more than a random quirk. A 2022 analysis of 10 years worth of trip reports posted on the r/DMT subreddit, totalling 3,778 DMT experiences, 45.5 percent included “entity encounters,” including: deities, aliens, “creature-based entities” like reptilian and insect beings, mythological beings, “machine elves,” and “jesters.”



An artistic rendition of a DMT entity. Spencer Whalen/Getty Images


While McKenna, who succeeded Leary as the voice of the psychedelic counterculture, is often credited with spreading the idea and expectation of encountering “self-transforming machine elves” in DMT space, humans have been encountering other seemingly intelligent beings while under the influence of DMT since well before he had his first trip in 1965. One of the hallmarks of ayahuasca is encountering other spirits and beings, so much so that ayahuasca is often personified as “Mother Aya.”


Even among the early pure DMT users in Szára’s experiments in the 1950s, people reported seeing “strange creatures, dwarfs or something.” A young physician recalled that “The whole room is filled with spirits.” Another stated, “In front of me are two quiet, sunlit Gods … I think they are welcoming me into this new world.”


A whole scientific literature is emerging to document the different kinds of entities people meet in DMT spaces. (And outside of peer review, there’s a debate over whether these entities and alternate dimensions are “real.” Gallimore, for example, has argued for conducting diplomacy with the DMT entities, since we can’t rule out their existence.)


Either way, the full-on construction of novel worlds and beings gives scientists an opportunity to study the mind in the midst of one of its most dazzling abilities: creating worlds of experience. “You can track the brain as it’s dissolving the habitual model of the world and generating a novel one that has equal or even deeper feelings of immersion,” Timmerman told me.

What DMT could mean for the science of consciousness


DMT, along with the other classical psychedelics — psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline — share a primary mechanism of action, binding to the serotonin 2A receptor and scrambling activity across both the brain’s default-mode and salience networks (brain regions responsible for self-referential thinking and helping our brains choose what information is worth paying attention to). DMT also binds to the sigma-1 receptor, which a team of Hungarian researchers recently found helps protect brain cells when they lack oxygen, as in a stroke. At least one neuroscientist thinks that could help explain the whole entities thing.


Also like other classical psychedelics, DMT is neither physiologically addictive (though any drug carries abuse potential) nor toxic to the brain (per that sigma-1 research, it could actually be neuroprotective). Still, DMT experiences can be destabilizing. One of the main risks is sometimes called “ontological shock,” where someone’s worldview is undermined in a way that causes lasting distress. One survey of 2,561 DMT users found that more than half who identified as atheists before their DMT trips no longer identified as atheist afterward. There’s nothing wrong with abandoning atheism per se, but upending worldviews should always be handled with care, caution, and available support.


That said, upending worldviews in reliable, controlled, and targeted ways could also help advance our understanding of how minds construct worldviews in the first place.


So far, though, psychedelics haven’t quite lived up to their promise of revolutionizing the science of consciousness. “The big limitation on the use of psychedelics to understand the mind and brain concerns how difficult it is to isolate components of the psychedelic experience that we’re interested in,” said Timmermann. His hope is that short trips associated with DMT, which can be repeated in quick succession without diminishing in intensity, will prove more easily interpretable to scientists working in lab settings. For example, DMT research is already turning up a curious pattern that hasn’t emerged with other psychedelics.


One of the major findings in psychedelic science has been that the entropy — or randomness, complexity, and disorder — of brain activity is a kind of signature of a trip’s intensity. Stronger trips are associated with higher levels of entropy in the brain, all the way to reports of “ego dissolution,” dubbed the “entropic brain” hypothesis by neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris. Most psychedelics push our minds from order to disorder.


One surprising thing


A 2006 study found that two months after taking psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, two-thirds out of 30 volunteers rated their trip as one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives.


Read Vox’s reporting on the science of how psychedelics crank up the dial of meaningful experiences here.


DMT fits this mold, up to a point. Low to medium doses show a reduction in the alpha frequency of brain waves (which correspond to relaxed and wakeful states), along with rising entropy, a signature finding of sober brains sinking deeper into a trip.


But in high doses of DMT, that trend flips. The self does not disappear. Instead, the self feels largely intact, but transported to alternate worlds reconstructed out of the chaos. The rising entropy gives way to new neural signatures of order. “We’re starting to see the emergence of low-frequency brain waves in the breakthrough state, usually called delta or theta waves,” Timmermann said. “What’s intriguing about them is that these brain waves are very much present when people are asleep and dreaming. And there’s a resonance between dreams and the DMT state, the deconstruction of the assumptions about external waking life and the reconstruction of a novel world of experience.”


These “contractions” in brain entropy, as Timmermann called them, tend to happen when his team asks tripping study participants to pay attention to a single, salient feature of their experience, like an entity. “Our perceptual systems are finding a way to make sense out of this chaos,” he said.


Researchers hope that probing how DMT deconstructs and reconstructs our experiences of the world can make at least some progress on psychedelic science’s original promise of a major leap in our understanding of consciousness. “Our scientists are interested in how world-modeling actually comes about, and whether something like DMT can simulate that for us,” said Timmermann. That, in turn, can help us understand “how we generate a model of the world in our habitual, daily lives.”


Next year, Timmermann’s research group is moving to University College London, where they’ll add DMT’s molecular relative, 5-MeO-DMT (bufo), to their research agenda, which, I kid you not, is considered even stronger than DMT. If DMT can help scientists study how brains model worlds, bufo can show what happens when the brain stops modeling everything altogether and a bare form of consciousness without content remains.


“5-MeO-DMT is like the modeler of no-worlds … it’s like a canvas without the paint on it. If we can have that experience, then you can look into the more fundamental, core workings of the mind and brain,” said Timmermann. Together, DMT and bufo could make for a hell of a one-two punch in the future of consciousness science.

What the heck is DMT doing in the human body?


Another mystery sets DMT apart from just about every other psychedelic: It’s naturally produced by the human body, and no one knows why.


Research published in 2019 led by a team at the University of Michigan found that some parts of the mammalian brain can have similar levels of DMT as they do serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates a huge variety of important functions, from behavior and mood to memory.


When trace amounts of naturally occurring DMT were first found in humans in 1965, scientists speculated that it may underlie mental illness, like schizophrenia. Further research found that DMT might actually mitigate symptoms of psychosis, which tanked that idea pretty quickly.


Next, in 1976, it was proposed that DMT might be a neurotransmitter, akin to serotonin and dopamine, that has a functional role in the body. Serotonin is popularly associated with happiness, dopamine with motivation and pleasure — but what the heck would DMT be doing in the neurochemistry of our minds?


A 2022 review of the last 60 years of debate over DMT’s function concluded that DMT is likely doing something in the brain. But in the two years since, new research has turned up more questions than answers.


It’s tempting to speculate. When Strassman called DMT “the spirit molecule,” he meant it rather literally: Its function in the brain, he argued, is simply to elicit psychological states that we call spiritual. Research published in 2019 showed that levels of DMT in rat brains spike during cardiac arrest, lending some substance to a link between DMT and near-death experiences.


But neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin, lead author of that study and considered one of the world’s leading experts on the puzzle of DMT in the human body, put it bluntly: “We know nothing — seriously! — about the role of endogenous DMT.”

Mainstreaming DMT


For all the far-out ridiculousness of DMT — the curvy geometry, the mischievous but generally benevolent elves, the prospect of hidden dimensions — it could have remarkably practical applications. Studies are beginning to corroborate anecdotes, for example, that DMT could treat cluster headaches, one of the most painful conditions known to humankind.


DMT could also offer a few advantages over the current generation of psychedelic therapy treatments that rely on MDMA or psilocybin. The big one is money: Psychedelic therapy is incredibly expensive. A few months of MDMA therapy recently tested in clinical trials cost about $11,537 per patient, nearly half of which came from paying two therapists to stay with each patient for a full eight hours during the MDMA sessions. DMT, since it winds down within 20 minutes, could make for much more affordable treatments.


Gallimore and Strassman have proposed the possibility of extending DMT trips via a steady IV drip, keeping levels of DMT in the body elevated and stable much like we do with anesthesia during surgery. Last year, researchers from Imperial College London kept 11 healthy volunteers in the DMT space for an extended period of 30 minutes, demonstrating for the first time that “extended DMT,” or DMTx, works and that the length and intensity of DMT therapy sessions could be customized to patient preferences.


“When we speak about precision psychiatry and how to treat individuals according to their specific profiles and needs, a plastic and dynamic psychedelic experience could make things cheaper and more effective,” said Timmermann.


DMT has already shown promising results for depression, and clinical trials are underway — and patents being filed — for DMT as an injectable treatment.

Related:Psychedelics might revolutionize therapy. What happens if you remove the trip?


Extended DMT would be exciting news on the consciousness science front, too. The longer people can stay in the strange worlds of DMT space, the more access that gives scientists and psychonauts alike to one of the mind’s most fascinating tricks: constructing worlds of experience. And even though these worlds may be so alien that many of us might be tempted to write them off, there’s no explanation for our universe, no matter how sober, that isn’t unfathomably weird, as philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel writes in his book, The Weirdness of the World. There’s only “a complex blossoming of bizarre possibilities,” where “something radically contrary to common sense must be true about the fundamental structures of the mind and the world.”


Given how DMT seems to shred just about every bit of common sense, perhaps it’ll help turn up some answers.


Whether that happens may depend on efforts to rein DMT in from the fringes of psychedelia. Given its ubiquity in nature, there’s plenty to go around. And given its presence in our bodies, we all stand to gain from a better understanding of what it’s doing there and why taking more of it leads to what remains perhaps the most bizarre kinds of experiences humans have yet encountered.


Oshan Jarow is a staff writer with Vox’s Future Perfect, where he focuses on the frontiers of political economy and consciousness studies. He covers topics ranging from guaranteed income and shorter workweeks to meditation and psychedelics.

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The tax penalty on married women hiding in plain sight

Millions would be better off if the US changed its joint filing system.


by Rachel Cohen
VOX
Dec 13, 2024

Two women work in a shared co-working space in Boulder, Colorado. 
Kathryn Scott Osler/Denver Post via Getty Images

Every spring, millions of American married couples engage in a little-discussed administrative duty: filing joint taxes. Originating in 1948 when married women rarely worked outside the home, this seemingly innocuous tax policy has evolved into one of America’s most overlooked barriers to gender equality.

The gender gap in America’s labor market is driven by more than just workplace discrimination and weak family policies. The tax code itself plays a surprisingly powerful role by subjecting the lower earner in a marriage (typically the wives) to higher rates. Research shows that this tax policy, known as joint filing, discourages wives from working exactly when their careers are taking off — affecting everything from their mid-career promotions to long-term retirement savings. And with more women holding down jobs than ever before, more women face the penalties of joint filing than ever before, too.

Related:
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Though this system can support marriages where one partner provides unpaid care or needs more flexibility, the practice is hard to justify when over 40 percent of marriages end in divorce, when research shows it holds women back from working, and when virtually every other developed nation has moved on. A complete overhaul of joint filing would hike taxes for most married couples — setting up daunting and likely insurmountable politics, at least in the near term. A set of narrower reforms, however, seem possible.

The joint filing trap


In the early 20th century, most states followed English common law, where a married man’s income was considered solely his. However, a few states followed so-called community property laws — recognizing marital income as jointly owned by both spouses. In 1930, the Supreme Court upheld the right of couples in community property states to file joint taxes, a practice which allowed them to pay the government less money overall. Then, in 1948, Congress extended this joint filing system to all married couples, standardizing the practice nationwide.

In a mid-20th century world where most married women were stay-at-home wives, the main effect of this change was to provide tax relief to these more traditional families. Breadwinner husbands were able to split their incomes with their non-working spouses, and pay less tax. But the newly established system included a built-in penalty for secondary earners that would become increasingly problematic as more women sought to join the workforce.

Here’s how the joint filing trap works: Under our tax system, higher incomes face higher marginal rates, meaning a couple’s combined income can push them into a higher tax bracket than if they filed separately. A married woman’s earnings, assuming she earns less than her husband, is taxed at the higher rate determined by her husband’s income. Joint filing essentially “stacks” her earnings on top of his for tax purposes.

To give a more concrete, albeit simplified, example: let’s say a woman, Kate, who earns $100,000, marries Jack, who earns $200,000, and they decide to file jointly. Together, their combined income of $300,000 would fall into the 24 percent tax bracket for joint filers. If Kate had filed individually, she would have been taxed in the 22 percent tax bracket, while Jack’s $200,000 would push him into the 32 percent bracket. Put simply, Kate’s earnings are taxed more when she jointly files with Jack.

Related:How marginal tax rates actually work, explained with a cartoon

Though married couples in the US have the option of filing separately, fewer than 7 percent actually do, as that almost always subjects their household to higher taxes than joint filing, in addition to causing them to lose other benefits. In this scenario, Kate and Jack’s take-home pay would be roughly $5,000 more if filed jointly than if they went with “married filing separately.”

These tax dynamics shape women’s behavior. Early in their careers, married young women often decide it makes more sense to quit working or go part-time, so their family can save on child care and pay less in tax.

Recent economic research has concluded that eliminating joint filing in the US would significantly increase married women’s workforce participation throughout their whole life.

“While the effects of joint taxation are most acute in early and mid-career, their cumulative impact shapes women’s lifetime economic trajectories,” Mariacristina De Nardi, an economist at the University of Minnesota, told Vox. She found it “striking” how the effects of joint filing persisted across different age groups, and despite women’s increasing educational attainment and aspirations, “continue to counteract broader societal progress” today.

America stands increasingly alone in maintaining this system. In the decades after World War II, most countries copied America’s joint filing approach, but by the 1970s and 1980s — both to advance gender equality and to boost overall employment — nearly all OECD countries reverted back to individual tax filing systems.

The empirical evidence from these reforms is remarkable: Sweden, which abandoned its joint filing system in 1971, saw significant increases in married women’s employment, as did Canada, which shifted to individual taxation in 1988. In a telling contrast, when the Czech Republic bucked the international trend and introduced joint taxation in 2005, the number of married women in the workforce went down.

Could we fix this in the US?

Joint filing was meant to support men in traditional marriages, which consisted of a male breadwinner and his stay-at-home wife. Given that labor market discrimination in the 20th century kept Black men’s wages low, most Black wives could not afford to stay at home.

“The joint return was never about helping women — it was about helping white guys pay less in taxes,” said Dorothy Brown, a tax law professor at Georgetown University.

Defenders of joint filing argue the model supports “household specialization” by enabling one partner to focus on valuable unpaid work like caregiving. But this argument looks increasingly thin in an era of longer lifespans, more dual-earner households, and high divorce rates. In 2012, the US Government Accountability Office released a study showing that a divorced woman’s income plummets by an average of 41 percent after a divorce, almost twice the decline that men experience. Academic research published in 2020 similarly found that wives who divorce after age 50 see a 45 percent decline on average in their standard of living, compared to a 21 percent drop for husbands.

Related:Let’s get divorced

The path to reforming joint filing in the US faces unique challenges. Today, any complete elimination of the practice would likely be politically dead in the water.

In the 1990s, when federal lawmakers proposed an optional individual tax filing system for married couples — which is not the same as the “married filing separately” option — conservative groups rallied hard against it. Activists argued it would create a “homemaker penalty” while undermining the institution of marriage by disincentivizing wedlock. Filing individually would qualify individuals for benefits and tax deductions they could not access either filing jointly or “married filing separately,” but the proposal failed, leaving married couples with only those two options.

University of Southern California Law professor Edward McCaffery, the author of a 1997 book on joint filing, said the political backlash to this proposal was revealing, as that legislation had already been a concession to social conservatives because it wasn’t aiming to completely eliminate joint taxation. “When Phyllis Schlafly and the Liberty Foundation came out against it, it was dead on arrival,” McCaffery told Vox. “It became clear it wouldn’t be enough to just not hurt traditional families, you’d have to give them some special goodies, too.”

The US system is particularly entrenched because health care and retirement systems have evolved for decades around joint family benefits. Married couples who file jointly, for example, typically qualify for lower health insurance premiums and more comprehensive coverage than those who file separately. Similarly, filing jointly gives married couples greater access to their spouse’s Social Security benefits.

Past decisions around work and family — including career gaps that erode skills and networks — have also created sticky “lock-in” effects that would be difficult for millions of couples to reverse, even if Congress abandoned joint filing tomorrow.

Still, more targeted reforms might work. During the Reagan administration, Congress briefly implemented a tax deduction for secondary earners, essentially reducing the tax penalty on wives by allowing couples to deduct 10 percent of the lower-earning spouse’s income, up to $3,000. Some economists have proposed bringing this idea back.

Michael Graetz, a tax professor emeritus at Columbia and Yale law schools, advocates both reinstating the secondary earner deduction and expanding child care subsidies. These changes would help protect secondary earners at a crucial career juncture, when child-rearing responsibilities often force women to reduce their working hours for financial reasons.

Tax policy might not be the first thing on the agenda for most feminist activists, but the case for rethinking joint filing is strong. As De Nardi’s research demonstrates, joint filing still poses a major barrier to women’s participation in the workforce, even for younger and more educated women.

“Over time, political inertia and the complexity of reforming entrenched tax systems have likely contributed to its persistence,” she said. “Policymakers and the public may also underestimate the long-term costs.”
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'Allow some of this to be privatized': GOP gov admits goal of DOGE is to gut Social Security


December 14, 2024
ALTERNET

New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu is bullish on a billionaire-led effort to cut social safety nets for working-class Americans — including the political third rail of Social Security.

Semafor reporter David Weigel recently interviewed Sununu, who is retiring after his successor, Republican Governor-elect Kelly Ayotte, assumes office on January 8. The Granite State governor expressed optimism about billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency," or "DOGE," (which is not yet an actual federal agency authorized by Congress) which he is co-leading with billionaire pharmaceutical investor Vivek Ramaswamy.

While Musk and Ramaswamy's advisory panel is expected to recommend the elimination of various labor and environmental regulations and the firing of thousands of public sector workers, Sununu is particularly hoping they will pursue cuts to both Medicare and Social Security. Sununu compared Musk and Ramaswamy's efforts to former President George W. Bush's failed proposal to privatize Social Security in 2005.

READ MORE: 'This is so bad': Experts rip Trump advisors' 'cartoonishly evil' proposal to abolish FDIC

"George W. Bush was absolutely right, and he’s been proven right time and time again," Sununu said. "You have to move that retirement age. That’s just so obvious... Whether it’s 62 or 64 or 65, find the right number that works. Do it for the next generation. Allow some of this to be privatized. Those models have proven to be absolutely rock solid, and work."

"George W. Bush was a couple of senators away from getting this done," he added. "So many of America’s problems would be cured."

Sununu specifically argued that the proposed austerity measures were necessary, saying: "In about eight years, Social Security benefits drop to 83%, Medicare goes bankrupt [and] the interest rates come due." The first point seems to come from the May 2024 Social Security trustees report, which states that the fund reserves that help pay for Social Security benefits will be spent down by 2035.

However, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has pointed out, Social Security could be made solvent for decades by simply removing the cap on paying into the fund. Currently, the super-rich only have to pay a 6.2% payroll tax of the first $132,900 they earn in a year into Social Security. But Sanders argues if that cap were removed, Social Security benefits would be fully paid for 52 more years. The Vermont senator added that seniors who earn less than $16,000 per year would get an additional $1,300 per month in benefits if that cap were removed.

READ MORE: 'Extraordinary situation': How Musk could personally reap billions from 'efficiency' panel

"When Republicans say they want to run back George W. Bush’s plan to destroy Social Security, believe them," Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson told AlterNet. "Elon Musk's slash and burn commission is a transparent plot to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."

Like Social Security, Medicare is also not a contributor to the federal deficit. Just as both employers and employees contribute 6.2% toward Social Security, they also contribute a 1.45% Medicare tax from every paycheck to keep the program funded. And unlike Social Security, there’s no wage cap on paying into that fund.

While Medicare's Hospital Insurance fund is expected to reach its limit in 2026, this can be remedied by — as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) recommended in 2019 — repealing language in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act'Allow some of this to be privatized': GOP gov admits goal of DOGE is to gut Social Security





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UNRWA Employees in Gaza Forced to Eat Animal Feed to Survive, Agency Head Says

That staff for Gaza’s main humanitarian group can’t access real food is a show of the severity of Israel’s aid blockade.
December 13, 2024

Palestinians queue to receive medicine at the UNRWA Japanese Health Center in Khan Yunis on the southern Gaza Strip on October 29, 2024.
Bashar Taleb / AFP via Getty Images


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Facing an increasingly dire food catastrophe under Israel’s famine campaign, the head of Gaza’s main humanitarian aid group says that its workers have resorted to eating animal feed to survive.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) Commissioner-General Phillippe Lazzarini said that the agency’s workers’ stories are “heartbreaking,” as Israel has maintained its near-total humanitarian blockade on the region.

“Stories are absolutely harrowing,” said Lazzarini, detailing how a staff member recently went to Gaza and heard from 2,000 UNRWA staff there. “For example, staff members saying that, ‘I lost 30 kilos, we are hungry, and we are just eating animal fodder to keep us alive.’”

The fact that even UNRWA staff, who help distribute and coordinate humanitarian aid as the main aid group operating in Gaza, can’t access real food is a show of the brutality of Israel’s blockade, the UNRWA head said.

“Hunger is a real reality, it is deepening in Gaza. You know, Christiane, in September we couldn’t reach 1 million people; 1.4 million people in October; 1.7 million people in November. Hunger is deepening,” he said.

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Gaza Humanitarian Aid Operation “Nearing Collapse,” UN Warns
UNRWA has suspended the use of Gaza’s main aid crossing point due to Israeli-protected violence. By Sharon Zhang , Truthout  December 9, 2024

Indeed, the UN has recorded a drastic decrease in aid entering Gaza in recent months, leading international food authorities to conclude in November that famine is about to occur, if not already present, in north Gaza, where Israel has blocked nearly all aid from entering since last October. The situation is also dire in central and southern Gaza, where food insecurity officials have also said famine is imminent.

At the same time, reports have found that Israel is empowering gangs to loot what little aid Israeli forces do allow in. An internal UN memo reported by The Washington Post last month found that such gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” from Israeli soldiers. These gangs operate in areas under Israel’s military control, on or nearby main aid routes, meaning that they are hijacking or attacking trucks while under the military’s watchful eye.

Further compounding the looting is Israel’s practice of killing Palestinians who protect the aid convoys. According to Gaza officials, Israel has killed at least 700 police who were tasked with protecting aid trucks since October 2023. Just on Thursday, Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinians who were guarding humanitarian convoys, Gaza medics said.

Israeli forces claimed that the people they killed were members of Hamas who were there to loot the convoy. But there is no evidence to support Israel’s claims, and in fact, Hamas forces have themselves been killing members of the looting gangs, Hamas has said and the UN has found.

Lazzarini said that the gangs have been able to operate due to the “lawlessness” in Gaza, caused by Israel’s genocide. He added that, just this week, Israeli forces killed and injured dozens of people in food lines, in a “repeat of the flour massacre” in February, when Israeli forces killed over 100 Palestinians in a food line in Gaza City.

International officials and experts have repeatedly warned that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war, including major humanitarian rights group Amnesty International, which concluded in a watershed report last week that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza.

“By continuing to starve Palestinians in Gaza, Israel does deepen resentment around the world, as well as its responsibility, and that of its accomplices, for genocide,” said UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese, in response to Lazzarini warning that starvation will only foster even more resentment toward Israel among Palestinians.

“However, the global rise of extremism, including in liberal democracies, demonstrates that one does not need to be starved to become extremist,” Albanese went on.

Israeli forces also killed at least 40 people in a strike on Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on Thursday, targeting a residential block with most of the victims hailing from the same family.

“We’ve seen absolutely horrific images from the scene. There are parents looking for their children, children covered in dust and blood, looking for their parents,” said UNRWA Senior Emergency Officer Louise Wateridge of the strike.
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 WHITE SUPREMACY 

Daniel Penny’s Trial Underscores the Need for Real Systems of Accountability

The criminal legal system isn’t designed to deliver justice for Jordan Neely. Here’s how we can.
December 12, 2024
Daniel Penny is seen arriving at court on December 9, 2024,
 in New York, New York. MEGA / GC Images

ANew York City jury on Monday found Daniel Penny not guilty of the crime of killing Jordan Neely in a New York subway car in 2023.

Prosecutors attempted to convict Penny on the charge of reckless endangerment for using a fatal chokehold to subdue Neely. Penny, a military veteran, claimed that Neely’s death was inadvertent and unintentional. Mayor Eric Adams, who previously defended Penny’s actions, said that Neely’s death was unfortunate, but has taken no steps to improve the systems that left him homeless and without adequate mental health care. Following the trial, conservative politicians echoed their calls for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to resign over what they baselessly claim to be a malicious and politically driven prosecution of a well-meaning good Samaritan.

In a press conference following the verdict, Neely’s father, Andre Zachary, said that “the system is rigged” and asked, “What are we going to do, people?” This is the starting point for a conversation about how to achieve some semblance of justice in cases where those with power use violence against the vulnerable in the name of “law and order,” be they citizens, the police or self-appointed vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman.

It is clear that the criminal legal system, even when utilized by so-called progressive prosecutors like Alvin Bragg, is not capable of producing real justice on behalf of those most in need of it. This system was not designed to provide justice for the unhoused, undocumented, unemployed or uninsured.

Supporters of the punishment bureaucracy tell us over and over that we must prioritize investments in policing, courts and prisons to protect the vulnerable, but time and time again we see these systems fail in that supposed mission. In fact, that system itself perpetrates tremendous amounts of harm in the form of violence, sexual assaults and homicides: Police alone are responsible for a third of all killings by strangers. Prison and jail guards engage in widespread brutality, torture and sexual violence, often with impunity. Police solve fewer than half of all violent crimes reported to them and even when they clear cases, their ability to produce actual public safety remains elusive.

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The US Failed Jordan Neely and Banko Brown Long Before They Were Murdered
As housing-insecure Black youth, Banko Brown and Jordan Neely needed care. Instead, they were policed and criminalized.
By Subini Annamma , Jyoti Nanda , Brian Cabral , Jamelia Morgan , 
TruthoutMay 17, 2023

If, instead of accepting the naive fantasy that the criminal legal system exists to protect us, we acknowledge that its primary mission is the maintenance of a system of economic inequality and political disempowerment, then its seeming failures make more sense. The system is, in fact, rigged. It is not capable of providing justice because it wasn’t designed for that purpose. Given this fact, we should stop looking to that system to help us. We should quit expecting courts to rescue us from abuse that benefits the powerful.

We must instead develop alternative systems of accountability that set the stage for a more expansive and powerful form of justice. We can look to a variety of community-centered models for uncovering the truth of events, properly measuring the harms that have been suffered and outlining real strategies of prevention so that others don’t experience the same fate. When the survivors of violence are asked about what they want as justice, the emphasis is often on finding out the truth and preventing harm happening to others.

Ideally, a transformative justice approach would involve victims, perpetrators and the community in a process of getting to the root of violence, addressing the needs of survivors, and developing systems of individual and structural prevention. Such a process requires the voluntary and meaningful participation of those accused of committing harm. This is not always easy or even possible. Some offenders will refuse such a process, but it is still important to hold it out as an alternative, even in cases where prosecutors claim to be trying to hold those with power and privilege to account.


The criminal legal system is, in fact, rigged. It is not capable of providing justice because it wasn’t designed for that purpose.

When prosecutors offer punishment as the tool of accountability, they play into the logic that punishment equals justice. And since the process is entirely punitive in its orientation, it makes martyrs of those it pursues. When defendants are found guilty, such as in the Trump verdict, the convictions become fodder for claims of politically motivated prosecutorial overreach. When defendants are found not guilty, the process turns those acquitted into potential heroes for the extreme right as in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse. So we need a system which seeks to tell the truth about what happened and makes clear that the community views what happened as dangerous, unnecessary and unjust. By telling the truth about what happened and offering the possibility of reconciliation, we make it harder for the discourses of martyrdom to take hold.

There are organizations across the country that specialize in transformative justice processes that attempt to get to the root of harmful behavior and chart a path forward such as the California-based Ahimsa Collective, Project NIA in Chicago and Seattle’s Collective Justice. These groups address both the needs of the individuals directly involved and the larger community, with an eye toward both short-term and long-term transformations.

Another model to consider is publicly controlled truth commissions. While criminal trials are aimed at achieving individual accountability in the form of punishment, truth commissions are focused on describing patterns of harm, recommending policies to prevent the repetition of such abuses and proposing measures to make reparations for past wrongs.

In this case, such a commission could be constituted by organizations connected to those most vulnerable to the kind of violence inflicted on Neely such as VOCAL-NY, whose members and leaders have experienced homelessness, incarceration, mental illness and drug involvement. They could pull together a panel to hear testimony about what happened, the individual and structural factors that caused it, and proposals for prevention and reparations.

One recent example of this is the efforts of We Charge Genocide in Chicago. This group was inspired by the efforts of civil rights leaders in the 1950s to document and expose racist violence in the U.S. on an international stage. Starting in 2014, the effort was designed to expose the impact of brutal policing of young people of color there. It was a tool for organizing young people and to get their own communities to see more clearly the challenges they faced in their everyday lives from police and a host of other institutional actors that too often viewed them as already guilty of something. Through a process of public hearings and information gathering, We Charge Genocide exposed the horrific practices of the Chicago police, including the presence of a police torture center used to extract confessions and otherwise terrorize people of color. Their efforts both shone a light on the harms young people experienced and outlined a series of restorative measures that could lead to a better future for them and their communities. This process ultimately contributed to the reparations agreement with the City of Chicago that created new youth resources and memorialized what had happened by funding the Chicago Torture Justice Center.

Ideally, a transformative justice approach would involve victims, perpetrators and the community in a process of getting to the root of violence.

There are several underlying causes that could be explored by a truth commission focused on the killing of Jordan Neely. For example, what role did Penny’s military service play? Did his military training instill in him an ethos of violent “threat neutralization,” or what sociologist Michael Sierra-Arevalo calls the “danger imperative” in the context of policing? Did Penny learn both the technique of chokeholds and the valorization of violent interventions?

Neely was repeatedly failed by the inadequacies of mental health services in New York City. Even Mayor Adams has decried the lack of service (while doubling down on morespending for police). A truth commission could ask: What services had Neely received (if any), and how were they inadequate? What kinds of models would be better?

Neely was unhoused, which probably contributed to both his mental health challenges and his frequent presence on the subway. Short-term treatment placements failed to move him toward stable supportive housing. How can this be corrected? What kinds of supportive housing would have best served his needs? What is preventing the development of this kind of housing?

What has the impact of Neely’s death been on Neely’s family and friends as well as the larger community? What could be done to help address their trauma and sense of insecurity?

We are not in a position to compel the state to seek justice on our terms. Instead, we must lead by example and build up the tools and capacities to rethink how we achieve justice in our own lives and in society at large. As long as we continue to rely on the punishment bureaucracy, we undermine those capacities and surrender the terrain of justice to institutions that have never had our best interests at heart.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Alex S. Vitale is professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and author of The End of Policing.
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Millions of U$ Taxpayer Dollars Have Subsidized Project 2025 and Climate Denial

Donors linked to fossil fuels have poured billions of tax-deductible donations into groups that deny climate science.
December 13, 2024
Boris Zhitkov / Moment / Getty Images; Edited: Truthout

After the hottest summer in recorded human history — along with Hurricanes Helene and Milton, flooding and wildfires — why isn’t there a greater push for action on climate change?

One reason is that big oil, gas and coal companies — and their allies in Congress — block the urgent action that’s required. They do this in part by denying basic climate science, and in many cases, they receive enormous, publicly subsidized tax benefits to do it. And in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, millions in charitable donations poured into policy development at the Heritage Foundation, producing the Project 2025 Blueprint for the incoming Trump administration.

It’s true. Wealthy donors and fossil fuel corporations regularly make “charitable” donations to nonprofit organizations that deny science, sow doubt about the urgency of climate change and run out the clock for timely action. When they deduct those contributions from their tax bill, they’re effectively being subsidized by you — the taxpayer.

Many of these donors have built their fortunes in the oil, coal and gas industries or in the industries that support them, like banking and insurance. They have a vested interest in ensuring the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. These include the Koch family of private energy giant Koch Industries, and the Scaife family, heirs to the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

Here’s how it works, according to a new report I’ve co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies and Climate Accountability Research Project: Through U.S. charitable giving tax laws, donors like the Kochs and Scaifes reduce their taxes when they give to qualified, tax-exempt nonprofit charities. The wealthier the donor, the greater the reduction in their tax bill. By one estimate, for every dollar a billionaire gives to charity, taxpayers chip in up to 74 cents in lost tax revenue.

From 2020 to 2022, U.S. nonprofits that deny basic climate science received $5.8 billion in tax-deductible donations.

Our report identified 137 nonprofit tax-exempt organizations that actively spread climate disinformation, working effectively to confound public opinion and delay urgent action on climate.

For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022. CEI boasts that it’s been “instrumental” in stalling climate action, both in blocking ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former (and now incoming) President Donald Trump to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement.

In 2013, Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, predicted that $500 million was given to organizations devoted to undermining the science of climate change. We estimate that figure has risen into the billions: Over three years, from 2020 to 2022, U.S. nonprofits that deny basic climate science received $5.8 billion in tax-deductible donations. Some $219 million went to groups that primarily work on climate disinformation.

The rest went to multi-issue organizations that include climate denial as part of their work — groups like The Heritage Foundation, which developed the extremist Project 2025 blueprint that would, among other things, roll back environmental regulations and cancel billions of dollars’ worth of investments in green jobs. Other recommendations from Project 2025 include the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (OCAA).

Conservatively, we estimate that somewhere between $219 million and $1 billion flowed directly to climate disinformation, all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, during our study period between 2020 and 2022.

Even though these are effectively our tax dollars at work, we don’t know the precise figure. That’s because many donors give through vehicles called donor-advised funds (DAFs), which mask the identity of donors and their recipient organizations. Roughly 16 percent of all donations to climate disinformation groups come through DAFs. Many billions more may have come through private individual donations as well.

If we want to save the planet, we need transparency reforms to reveal this web of secret donations.

The fossil fuel industry has harnessed our charitable system for their self-serving, harmful disinformation campaigns — and they do it largely in secret. We know the oil, gas and coal industry has been funding disinformation for almost half a century, even as their own internal research documented the harms from carbon and methane emissions. So what can we do about it? One simple step is to improve transparency, so the public has more accurate information about where these taxpayer-subsidized donations are going.

Currently, DAF sponsoring organizations — like Schwab Charitable or Fidelity Charitable — are only required to disclose total grants to nonprofits from their sponsoring fund, not from each DAF account, so we don’t know the individual donor who gave the funds. Our report urges lawmakers to pass legislation to require grants from DAFs to be reported on an individual account basis.

We’re also calling to close another DAF loophole. Private charitable foundations, which are required by law to distribute 5 percent of their assets each year, are increasingly giving funds to DAFs and counting that toward their payout requirements. That loophole, which can conceal the actual grant recipients, should be closed.

U.S. taxpayers are likely subsidizing billions of dollars of donations to climate misinformation organizations. If we want to save the planet, we need transparency reforms to reveal this web of secret donations.



Chuck Collins is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), where he co-edits Inequality.org. He’s the lead author of the new IPS and Climate Accountability Research Project report, “Fossil Fuel Philanthropy: How Taxpayer-Subsidized Charities Promote Climate Change Disinformation and Stall Urgent Action.” See an archive of Chuck’s writing, videos and commentaries.
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