This past

week the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that would

eliminate the marriage tax penalty for married couples as

of the 2001 filing year.

The measure, which will

allow married couples to claim two times the individual

standard deduction, seeks to eliminate the existing

$1,400 discrepancy between single partners filing

separate returns and married partners filing a joint

return. The bill also promises to expand the bottom 15

percent tax bracket so that married couples filing

jointly won't be penalized for pooling their incomes,

which puts many married people into a higher tax bracket

than if they were single and claiming a single income.

The legislation comes on

the heels of the Congressional Budget Office report that

the federal budget surplus is expected to grow

"between $4.5 trillion and $5.7 trillion" over

the next decade, $2.17 trillion of which is non-Social

Security surplus revenue. Republicans and some Democrats

have seen that, even allowing for aggressive national

debt repayment, the federal government will be taking in

way more than is needed to fund its own operation.

President Clinton promises

to veto the bill, calling the surplus predictions

speculative and Republicans irresponsible. Tom Daschle

(D-South Dakota) called the budget surplus projections

the "fiscal equivalent of the dot com stock

market." Democrats fear that Republicans are

spending money that is vital to paying down debt and

saving Social Security and Medicare, and furthermore,

spending a surplus which has not yet materialized. In

classic spin mode, they accuse Republicans of

"spending" money that is not theirs to spend.

What we have is the

opposite of deficit spending - a federal government

playing robber baron to millions of American citizens,

taxing us to the hilt to create surplus revenue. Business

as usual.

The only saving grace is

that Clinton's veto will come in an election year, a

reality which helped to lure some Democrats across the

aisle to vote for the tax cut. The Democratic party

leadership worries that the onus of a presidential veto

will rest squarely with Democratic candidates in

November.

When government coffers

become bloated with our hard-earned dollars, and through

executive veto, the best efforts of Congress to return

that money to its rightful owners are thwarted, what

we're really talking about is redistribution of wealth.

It's quite painful enough, thank you, to pay what we do.

To pay more than is necessary is theft.

The worst that could happen

if this tax cut survived the presidential cleaver and the

economy took a dive would be that the government might

have to tighten their belt and reduce expenditures.

That's a reality most Americans can relate to. If the

government had less money to spend, they would be less

equipped to manage the needs of the American people, and

(gasp) the citizens might have to do more for themselves,

and (double gasp) more to help each other.

And we wonder why America

seems to have no heart. America has grown to rely on her

government to solve every problem and fulfill every need,

which was the plan all along of the socialist-leaning

ruling elite.

I believe in compassionate

conservatism. I believe that when there is suffering and

there is no one else to help, America will take care of

her own. One needs only to look at the outpouring of

support for victims of natural disasters to know that

when times are tough, we still have a heart for one

another.

Our government's sense of

entitlement to our money, and our people's sense of

entitlement to a return on that "investment" is

wrenching the ground from beneath us. We've gone from a

laissez-faire economic philosophy, where we trusted

ourselves with commerce, prosperity, and each other, to a

lazy-fair system, where nobody trusts anybody.

Our system cannot survive

lazy-fair system, producers eventually stop producing,

and become all too satisfied to suckle the government

teat with the rest of their fellow big government

beneficiaries.

We don't need trillion

dollar surpluses. We don't need to be micromanaged. We

don't need to be subsidized, prioritized, supersized, or

annuitized. We need to be free and self-sustaining. We

need to make our own way and make our own communities. We

need the responsibility of caring for those in need

around us to put us back in touch with our own humanity.

There's not much left to

give after the government taketh away, and not much

motivation to become an asset with the government minding

everyone's business.

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