Remember the outrage over the "marriage penalty" that affects many two-income couples? The Senate bill would only start to address this problem five years from now. By that time, the Bush presidency - and a lot of marriages - may be over.
With other tax breaks, the bill does the opposite trick: providing tax relief right away, then supposedly ending it a few years down the road. A tax break for college tuition is slated to die after 2005. Relief for some of those hit by the alternative minimum tax would end after 2006. Sure, Congress is really going to let a popular tax break for the upper-middle class die in an election year.
This is dishonest and cynical.
At least the plan's centerpiece, a reduction in income-tax rates that is fully phased in by 2007, is not so laden with gimmicks. To its credit, the committee's draft plan sets the top marginal rate at 36 percent - which is more progressive than the President's 33 percent - and makes the lowest rate 10 percent right away.
Another sloooooow phase-in is the repeal of the estate tax over 10 years. If Congress weren't so intent on being generous to billionaires, it could afford to get more relief sooner to the parties sometimes genuinely injured by the inheritance tax: family farms and small businesses.
Congress is playing three-card monte with the public, prattling about tax cuts that won't take effect for years or will disappear when the others take effect - while disguising the way this mess of a tax bill will squeeze spending on education, health care and even defense every year for the next decade.
Thanks to a surfeit of lemmings and a shortage of statesmen, America is fouling up its fiscal priorities.
