LET'S SEE NOW. As a gay man, I am single with no dependent children. Most gay men, in fact, are (legally) single males with no dependent children. In the same way, most lesbians are single females and fewer have dependent children than do heterosexuals.
That being the case, where is my gain, my tax cut, our tax cut, in the recent, much heralded, balanced budget and tax cut agreement? There wasn't one.
Keep in mind some of the major provisions of the new law:
- A $500 dollar income tax credit for each child. People who earn up to $25,000 but who do not owe income taxes can deduct the amount from their social security tax.
- A $1,500 tax credit for each of the first two years of a child's college, and eventually a $2,000 credit for each of the next two years.
- Higher taxes on cigarettes to pay for medical care for?cigarette smokers? No?children again, specifically, children whose parents do not provide health insurance for them.
As the Chicago Tribune tersely headlined its front page analysis of the agreement, "Got kids? You'll cash in."
But if you are single person with no dependent children, that is, if you are a typical gay person? Then there is nothing much here for you.
Now no one need begrudge anyone else's paying lower taxes. After all, it is their own money to begin with, not the government's money. They worked for it, they earned it, they should be able to keep it. The objection here is that other people got a tax reduction and most gays did not. That is, the "tax cut" effectively raised the proportion of the total tax burden that we will be paying, including even the social security tax. Our taxes, in short, just rose compared to everyone else's.
No doubt the conservative wing of the Republican Party was happy to provide such conspicuous support for its "pro-family" agenda and produce benefits for "pro-family" voters. That is called "servicing your core constituency."
But what about President Bill Clinton? In 1992 (and promising a "middle class tax cut"), Clinton received two-thirds of the gay vote. In 1996, by all accounts he was estimated to have received at least 60 percent. According to The New York Times (Nov. 10, 1996), Clinton received 57 percent of the singles' vote, about twice Bob Dole's 31 percent.
Was Clinton aware that this law would benefit everyone but gays and others without children? Despite our national leaders' claims, echoed by Democratic fund-raisers, that we are a Clinton "core constituency," we seem to have been ignored. No one seems to have mentioned this during policy discussions. No one seems to have made an issue of it. But it is at least worth pointing out that this looks like another example of a double standard policy between (most) gays and (most) heterosexuals?something like "don't ask, don't tell" surfacing in the economic realm. And it looks like a policy that is of a piece with the Defense of Marriage Act and the Communications Decency Act.
It would have been possible for our national gay and lesbian organizations to raise the issue with the administration, or with our supporters in Congress, while the agreement was still in the discussion stage. But they almost surely did not?and did not, I suspect, for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, they do not think of gay interests in economic terms. They do not see most gays as having an economic life at all, much less an economic life that is differentiable from that of most heterosexuals. Nevertheless, earning a living is how most of us spend about half our waking hours, and spending (and enjoying) our income is how we spend a good deal of the other half, so any economic benefit that accrues to us represents an increase in our quality of life.
There is a sense, of course, in which the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is about our economic life. Specifically ENDA is about increasing the number of jobs open to gays and lesbians. In practice that means it would enable gays to choose from among more jobs, choosing a higher paying (rather than lower paying) one. But, of course, reducing the taxes we pay would have the same effect as opening up access to a higher paying job, and it would involve less coercion of others, and therefore less resentment and less opposition.
Then, too, people who have more money are less likely to be discriminated against, and it certainly enables them to cope with discrimination when it occurs, so lower taxes would benefit us all now without having to wait for a change in employment law.
A second reason could be that our national organizations have little or no experience in working for lower taxes or reduced government expenditures. When they are concerned with money issues, it is usually in trying to obtain more government expenditures, as for subsidies for AIDS drugs, or money for AIDS research or AIDS education.
But they have little idea of how to work for lower taxes, and perhaps not much commitment to it. They lack the vocabulary, the arsenal of arguments, and ultimately the congressional contacts among the mostly Republican (and conservative Democrat) zealous budget cutters to make the case that gays, if only as people without children, should be included in the tax reduction package in some way.
For instance, let everyone equally spend a college tuition credit on further education or job training or any other personal improvement program, including travel or book purchases. Or let each of us add the same amount, $7,000, to a personal IRA. Or use the cigarette tax-derived money to cover the deductible in everyone's health insurance program. None of these is an ideal example, but they are a start.
But a far better solution would be to let individuals make their own decisions about what will most benefit them in any given year by simply reducing everyone's taxes by $500, or $1,000 or whatever. Period. Or reduce the income (or social security) tax rate by some amount across the board for everyone. After all, it is our money too. We worked for it. We earned it. We should be able to keep it, just like people who have children.
Lesbians often make the claim, and it is a very plausible one, that they more often feel discriminated against as women than they do as homosexuals. So they join women's advocacy groups, such as the National Organization for Women.
In the same way, I suspect, gay men often experience, deprecation and even dismissive responses as "singles" or "childless" more than they do as homosexuals. But there are no effective organizations to lobby for us and represent our interests in those capacities.