While de facto discrimination against various groups still exists in practice, in some areas and against some minorities, de jure discrimination (specified in the law) has been pretty much eliminated. When challenged, legal discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, or sex can hardly ever stand up in court, and it’s hard to find a lawmaker at the Congressional or state level who has the temerity to propose a discriminatory bill.
There is one class of Americans, however, that still is openly and massively discriminated against. This class of Americans is made up of the 16 million full-time homemakers. The discrimination is most blatant in the income tax law.
Nobody really defends the discriminatory provisions. Public officials and media spokesmen just evade the issue by not talking about it.
The income tax law discriminates against the mothers who take care of their own children, and in favor of the mothers who pay someone else to take care of their children. It’s so outrageous that one wonders how the lawmakers had the nerve to pass something so unfair.
You can see it for yourself on line 41 of the 1986 income tax return Form 1040 which most people are preparing right now, and on attachment Form 2441. If you pay someone else to take care of your children under age 15, you can reduce your income taxes up to $720 for the first child, and up to $1,440 for two or more children. But the mother who cares for her own children? Tough for her, she is denied these tax credits.
How could this be written into federal law without a big public policy debate? One explanation might be that the two-earner couples, having an average of $311,000 a year more family income to spend than the traditional breadwinner-homemaker couples, are more aggressive in demanding tax reductions and preferential treatment, while the mother who is not employed is less able to go public about her needs. Another explanation might be that the social service bureaucracy lobbied for these changes in order to create a bigger demand for more government-financed child care services. One way to remedy this discrimination is to “universalize” the child care credit, that is, make it universally available to all children regardless of the lifestyle of their mothers. This could be done most fairly and efficiently at $500 per child for the 19 million children under age six.
Now we can hear the argument, “but that is too costly!” Costly? There should be no price tag on discrimination. When it comes to taxes, fairness is far more important than cost.
An alternate remedy for this discrimination would be to trade off the child care credit for a $1,000 increase in the tax exemption for all children. We could increase it from the $2,000 figure established in the new tax reform law to $3,000. If the cost argument is raised again, the increased exemption could be limited to children under age 15, or even under age 6.
Actually, the children’s tax exemption ought to be $5,000 if a child were to be worth as much in the income tax system today as a child was worth 35 years ago.
Another discriminatory provision of the income tax law is the Individual Retirement Account (the IRAs). Under the new tax reform act that was passed last year, the number of people eligible to take the IRA deduction is greatly diminished, but the discrimination in IRAs is still as unjust as it has been for several years.
Check it for yourself on line 26 of Form 1040. If both husband and wife are employed, they can put a total of $4,000 per year into IRA accounts. But if the wife is a full-time homemaker (whom Internal Revenue falsely calls a “nonworking spouse”), the couple can put a total of only $2,250 into IRA accounts, which is a discrimination of $1,750 per year plus all the income that produces for the rest of their lives.
Like any employed man or woman, the full-time homemaker will grow old and need funds in her senior years. Why is the homemaker denied her equal opportunity to save tax-free funds for retirement in IRAs?
Now comes the trendiest issue to hit the halls of Congress in the last several years: mandated parental leave. This is just another way to mandate a preferential benefit to the employed mother which, as a practical matter, cannot be used by the full-time mother.
Mandated parental leave is another discriminatory benefit that would force the traditional family, which provides its own child care on a lower average income, to subsidize the two-earner couples who have a higher average income. Mandated parental leave should be rejected first of all because it is a new discrimination on a class of mothers who are already savagely discriminated against.
