Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Young, single taxpayers lose again
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
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- Old Virginny survives in the New River Valley
- Where we vote affects how we vote
- Learning to love the Smart Road
From the RoundTable blog
President Bush and the Republicans who control Congress have a soft spot not just for the wealthy but also for married couples and families. Six years of tax cuts have lightened the civic burden on both demographics, shamelessly shifting it onto low- and middle-income households, especially the ones with young, single taxpayers.
Politicians have believed in a wholesome, "Leave it to Beaver" world with little relation to reality for a long time. The Government Accountability Office identifies more than 1,100 federal benefits, rights and privileges for married people passed over the years.
Wedded bliss, indeed.
What is different today is the Bush administration's brazen indifference and sometimes hostility toward anyone not married and reproducing. The federal government has gone out of its way to make life easier for everyone except young, unmarried, childless Americans. Such preferential treatment should offend anyone with a taste for fairness and justice.
Running for president in 1999, Bush signed a pledge card from Americans for Tax Reform, promising to oppose tax increases. He went even further and vowed, "If elected president, I will oppose and veto any increase in individual or corporate marginal income tax rates or individual or corporate income tax hikes."
Like his father, who famously proclaimed, "Read my lips: No new taxes," the younger Bush has broken his promise.
The $69 billion tax-cut package Bush signed last week included a tax increase for teenagers.
Responsible young people, aged 14 to 17, used to have their investment earnings taxed at a lower rate than adults. The idea was to encourage savings for college or for getting started when moving out from the parents' house.
Under the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act, teens will pay the same rate as their parents, retroactive to the first of the year. Their tax on interest income, capital gains and dividends could triple.
Most teen savers with modest investments will hardly notice the difference, but it illustrates the misplaced priorities of the bill's backers. Bush and his fellow Republicans are willing to eliminate incentives for young people to save for college and the future in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
The higher teen taxes will generate about $2 billion over 10 years.
It is a "gotcha" moment for Bush, a chance for his critics to point out another hypocrisy and compare him to his father. The same goes for the dozens of lawmakers, among them Virginia's Sen. George Allen and Southwest Virginia's Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Virgil Goode, who also signed the pledge and violated it by voting to increase taxes on teens.
Yet young people, especially the single ones, should not treat it so flippantly. This is but the latest in a pattern of abuse that should worry them.
The more insidious burden thrust upon young people will arrive years down the road, when the tab comes due for Bush's record deficits.
During his first years in the White House, Bush sold his tax cuts, in part, as a boon to families. He and his allies ended the so-called "marriage penalty" and increased tax credits for families with children.
Because families can write off more, single people pay a greater proportion of total tax collections. The marriage penalty transforms into an unmarried penalty.
Pro-family forces argue that government has a vested interest in conducting a little social engineering by encouraging marriage -- heterosexual marriage, anyway -- as the fundamental unit of society and as a means of making sure there are future generations of Americans.
Those who often condemns homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice" sure seem eager to support public subsidies for a genuine lifestyle choice: being married with children.
People should be marrying for love, not for tax breaks. The same goes for having kids. If couples choose to produce offspring, it should be for the right reasons, not because Uncle Sam needs children.
Government best employs subsidies to encourage a result that would not be achieved without them. The biological urge to reproduce is not going anywhere.
As long as young, mostly single people fail to show up at the ballot box, as long as they do not lobby for their interests, politicians will abuse them.
As for the 14- to 17-year-old taxpayers, they may not vote to throw the old, family-centric bums out.
So much for no taxation without representation.
