A phony flap was created in the media recently when Governor Mario Cuomo and Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder attacked White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan for saying that President Reagan’s tax reform proposal would help traditional families in which the wife stays home to take care of her children. It’s hard to imagine a more nonproductive political argument for experienced politicians to initiate, but they apparently let their ideology obscure their judgment.
Hoping to stir up a family feud in the Reagan Administration, the press rushed over to solicit the opinion of Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler. Washington reporters asked her if it were true that President Reagan has a “master plan” to use the tax code to force women back into their traditional role of staying home with their children instead of holding outside jobs. Naturally, she denied this as ridiculous. The Washington Post injected its editorial position into its news story by saying that Heckler’s remark “appeared to disagree” with the views of Patrick Buchanan. That’s false; Buchanan and Heckler’s statements are wholly consistent with each other and with Reagan’s tax reform package.
The Reagan tax reform proposal advantages all families. Because it reduces the tax rates, it benefits everyone regardless of family status. Because it raises the exemption for children, it benefits all children regardless of the lifestyle of their parents.
This across-the-board raising of the tax exemption for children is the most important single plank in the Reagan tax proposal. It is clearly pro-family. It is wholly noncoercive in regard to the lifestyle/work pattern of the mother and father.
The devaluation of children in the income tax code is one of the most shocking liberal policies of the last 30 years. Since 1955, the value of a child in the income tax code has been reduced by at least three-fourths, and the Reagan tax reform proposal starts the long trek back toward remedying this inequity.
The Reagan tax proposal is in stark contrast to the Bradley-Gephardt tax proposal which would increase the tax exemption for adults, but not for kids. Their plan would reduce the proportional value of children in the tax code even further.
There is one section of the Reagan tax reform proposal which would particularly help traditional families, and that is the section on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). The Reagan tax reform proposal would remedy the discrimination against the traditional homemaker which started under the Carter Administration.
At the present time, married couples where the wife is in the paid labor force can put $4,000 per year in IRAs, which have enormous tax benefits. But married couples where the wife works in the home can put only $2,250 per year into IRAs, a massive discrimination of $1,750 per year, plus all the income that money would produce for the rest of their lives until they retire.
This discrimination is so outrageous that both the Republican and Democratic 1984 Party Platforms and all women’s groups, both conservative and liberal, have demanded that it be rectified. It is difficult to see how such a grievous disparity got into the income tax law unless pressure groups just ganged up to deal out the traditional homemaker.
When Patrick Buchanan says that Reagan’s tax reform proposal has special benefits for traditional families, he means that the Reagan proposal will replace this discrimination with fairness. Secretary Heckler correctly pointed out that the change purportedly favoring traditional families is simply designed to foster “fairness” and “equity.”
The Reagan tax reform proposal is noncoercive as to the lifestyle decisions which individual families make. This is in stark contrast to the Carter Administration tax policies which included financial incentives to wives to enter the paid labor force.
Part of the flap created by the media over Buchanan’s statement appears to have resulted from his use of the expression “traditional family.” Since the word traditional means a custom handed down from preceding generations, it’s a perfectly proper word to describe the family lifestyle where the husband is the principal breadwinner and the wife is the principal homemaker. There are millions of such families in America today.
If this debate is about semantics instead of substance, then we should give some space to the grievance borne by the traditional homemakers who are constantly put down as “non-working wives” by the media, by feminists, and even by some banks selling their IRA accounts. All the traditional homemakers I know work very hard, indeed.
