PSLmodels
Weight and age CPS tax units in the same household together
Motivation
Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend is a UBI restricted to adults, plus some tax increases. Since some children file taxes separately from their parents (https://github.com/PSLmodels/taxdata/issues/321), this causes some tax units to be worse off, since they experience the tax increase without the UBI (analysis). These are low-income tax units, so it makes the plan look overly regressive. This doesn't reflect reality, however, since nearly all share resources with household members that receive the UBI.
Aggregating tax units back to households would address the problem, but this is invalid (https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/issues/1961), because tax units in the same household have different weights, and they're aged separately.
Others have reaggregated tax units to household or SPM unit and used the original household/SPM unit weight (just adjusting the total tax liability), but this is limited to the most recent CPS tax unit year, and pending the new Python scripts, also relies on separate tax unit creation code for anything newer than 2015. This won't be as big an issue when 2018 CPS tax units are available, but someone could still want to project into the future.
Reaggregation aside, it seems intuitively inaccurate to assign different weights to tax units within the same household.
Suggestion
Would it be possible to add constraints to the weighting and aging routines to ensure that tax units within the same household have the same weight?
I believe a similar step is discussed at the end of page 142 in this report: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/06foertsch.pdf
This report may also be relevant at pg 4:
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-12/55941-CBO-Household-Income.pdf
