“I have never wanted to counsel people, hurry up and get a divorce,” said Fern Frolin, a divorce lawyer at Mirick O’Connell in Boston, whose clients often have high incomes. “I always want to say, ‘Take your time, think if this is the right thing for you.’ But in this particular instance, we could be talking about 15 to 20 years of support, and shifting the tax burden for the last years of a person’s working life.”

Under the current system, people paying alimony can deduct those payments — no matter how big the amount — from their income before calculating what they owe in taxes. That deduction provides a significant benefit to the wealthiest Americans, whose top tax rate is 37 percent and who would otherwise owe taxes on all of their income, including what they paid out in alimony. Right now, the rich disproportionately deduct alimony — about 20 percent of taxpayers who currently claim the deduction are in the top 5 percent of household income earners.