Gilbert Gutknecht: “If the gentleman from Illinois will yield, it is interesting, we have had several of my staffers over the last couple of…”

“If the gentleman from Illinois will yield, it is interesting, we have had several of my staffers over the last couple of years who have gotten married. In fact, we had two people working on my staff who married each other. We did the calculation for them. It was $1,400, an extra $1,400 in taxes that they were going to have to pay that they would not have had to pay if they would have simply lived together. We look at this wonderful picture of these two young people here and we think principally about young people getting married. But I was at a meeting with some seniors and one of them came up to me with kind of a funny look on his face and he said, ``I hope you do something about this marriage penalty.'' I said, ``Really? Why?'' He said, ``Well, I'm facing kind of an ethical dilemma myself as to whether or not this woman I'm now seeing and I should get married, because we realized with our particular financial situations, we're going to pay a penalty of over a thousand dollars if we get married. It really puts us in sort of a moral dilemma because we know what the right thing to do is but the government shouldn't encourage you to do the wrong thing.''”