Civil partnerships, brought in for the purpose of giving the same legal rights for gay couples as married ones had, presumably also granted these rights. Since then gay marriage has rendered these redundant for their original purpose but they still exist. Some overtly non-romantically involved, long term, co-habitees are now using civil partnerships to protect the surviving person from estate duties upon the other's death.
The anomaly now is that the people have to be of the same sex and there is pressure to allow people of the opposite sex to form them.
Can't you just accomplish the same thing with a trust? Admittedly it's a few hundred dollars instead of whatever the marriage license fee is, but, really?
I don't know but in the occasional debates I heard around this issue, trusts were never mentioned. Maybe that's a more possible solution in the USA. The attraction of civil partnership as thought of for these cases is that it's understood to just be a legal arrangement that confers all the legal rights of spouses to property automatically. Because it's possible for same sex people I've heard of two widowers who share a house entering such an arrangement.
What's interesting is that this and some other loopholes could be fixed pretty well by making estate tax apply to married/partnershipped couples and also making it directly proportional to the age gap between the deceased and recipient (with appropriate tax credit measures in the opposite direction).
Personally I don't see them as loopholes, they should be brought in, in my view. I think it's awful that when two people have shared a house for as long as many married people have, can be facing homelessness for other when the "wrong" one dies.
I don't live in America, didn't know it was so different there, I think it's a quarter of a million here and that's if you're a child of the deceased, it's a lot worse if your unrelated
That’s the Federal Estate Tax; individual states still have their own estate taxes. In Oregon, for example, the estate tax kicks in for assets above $1 million, and is graduated from 10-16% depending on the value of the estate.
Edit: the tax does not apply to assets going from one spouse to the other, though.
