Nancy L. Johnson: “this bill is not first about tax relief. It is first about tax fairness. It is also about relief, but this is primarily…”

“this bill is not first about tax relief. It is first about tax fairness. It is also about relief, but this is primarily a matter of fairness. This bill does two very simple things. It gives a married couple double the deduction that a single person would get. A single person would get a deduction and the married couple gets twice the deduction, but it does something even more important than that because the deductibility issue is really relatively minor in determining how much taxes one pays. The exciting thing that this bill does is to double the 15 percent bracket for married couples. That means when my kids make the economic sacrifice--and I am proud they are but it is a big sacrifice--to stay home with their kids and live on one salary, when they start going back into the workforce because they do not want their skills to get too rusty, when they start going back into the workforce in order to balance their responsibility to their kids and their responsibility to the economic strength of the household, they want to go back in sooner rather than later but part time, not full time. When we let them get popped up into a 28 percent bracket at $43,000, we end up taxing their income so heavily that their husband says, ``oh, honey, do not go to work. Between the expenses of work and what it will do to us in taxes, it is better not to work outside our home. We are educating women in America to higher standards than we have at any other time in our history.…”