Maggie Gallagher
What's the Democrats' problem with decent pro-marriage tax reform? Just before the Senate passed a marriage tax relief bill worth about $250 billion over 10 years, President Clinton denounced the GOP for its "reckless" tax cuts. Too much marriage relief, for too many married couples who are too affluent, the Democrats said, preferring their own, teensy marriage tax cut that limits relief to two-income married couples.

The claim that $250 billion a year is "too much" for marriage is pretty hard to make, given new Congressional Budget Office estimates of a $2.2 trillion budget surplus over the next 10 years -- not counting a dime of the Social Security trust fund. In fact, the CBO found $300 billion more in tax overpayments than the White House estimated just a few weeks ago. If the money is there, how do you explain Democrats' continuing resistance to this popular pro-family tax cut?

At a news conference Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle tried. "This is an abomination," Daschle said, pointing out "irreconcilable differences between Republicans and Democrats on the marriage penalty." What differences? Daschle made three arguments, all of which point to many Democrats' continuing uneasiness (beneath their lip-service support) for pro-marriage tax reform. First, "Their legislation actually creates a singles penalty," said Daschle. The GOP plan does no such thing. Not a single unmarried person will face a tax increase. But in the Democrats' view, if you try to help married couples, you are ipso facto hurting singles.

Second, Daschle charged the GOP's version "lopsidedly favors those at the very top of the economic scale, at the expense of the middle class." Sen. Ted Kennedy, that great patron of marriage, echoed this charge, according to the L.A. Times, calling the GOP bill "plums for the rich and crumbs for everyone else." The terrible truth is that it is the Democrats who are trying to give assistance only to the more affluent two-income families -- offering plums to two-career couples and not even crumbs to hard-working families who keep a parent at home. In 1996, according to the Census Bureau, the median income of a married couple family with a wife in the labor force was $58,381, compared to just $33,748 for married couples without a wife in the labor force. If you looked at marriages with two full-time workers (the prime beneficiaries of the Democratic proposal), the affluence gap would be even larger.

Maggie Gallagher
