July 21, 2000

We should take any tax cut we can get

When it comes time to file their first tax return as a married couple, many newlyweds are shocked to discover that Uncle Sam frowns on marriage. They discover a tax bill much larger than they would bear as unmarried people just living together.

Last week the House of Representatives took a step toward ending the marriage penalty by overwhelmingly approving a bill that would phase out the marriage tax during a 10-year period.

That's better than not doing it at all &emdash;but 10 years? The federal treasury is swimming in excess tax collections. There's no good excuse for stretching out any modest tax cut &emdash; and in the grand scheme of things the marriage tax, while big to those it penalizes, is small potatoes. The 10-year effect of the tax cut would be a reduction of $182 billion in federal tax revenue, not even a noticeable blip out of many trillions of dollars of taxes to be collected overall.

The long timeline is symptomatic of congressional greed, the bipartisan reluctance of congressmen to let go of any taxpayer money once they have it in hand. It's much more fun, and much more conducive to building power, to spend money on favored constituencies' pet programs than it is to send money back to those who earned it.

Nevertheless, the very wise economist Milton Friedman once observed that we should take any tax cut we can get.