Molly Ivins April 8

AUSTIN, Texas — Right after the Easter advertisements, with their bunnies and bonnets and nice purple eggs, comes an odd seasonal ad campaign urging you to feel sorry for yourself.

A fine leather-goods firm displays a handsome wallet, open and empty, under the headline, "Thanks to the IRS, your therapist won't be the only one you open up to next week."

On television, some poor soul — who looks like a character from "Night of the Living Dead" performing the 13th labor of Hercules — struggles with his income tax form at 4 a.m. This is to persuade you to take your 1040 to a tax accountant.

On another channel, full raging paranoia blooms as a terrified taxpayer faces the arrival of the forces of jackbooted fascism — the dweebs of the Internal Revenue Service improbably transformed into storm troopers — because he failed to add Line 278b to Line 346a before subtracting from 232c on Schedule D. This is also in aid of the thesis that you should seek professional counseling before tackling a 1040.

And the commercial advertisements are nothing compared to the political propaganda that blooms in the spring, tra-la. Our great nation has a remarkable number of groups and politicians eager to persuade you that you are hideously, horribly burdened beyond right or reason by a rapacious government that strips you of all your hard-earned gains and leaves you standing naked in a barrel while your wife and children starve in a nearby gutter.

But as Jane Bryant Quinn points out in a recent Newsweek piece, 'tain't necessarily so. According to the U.S. Treasury, four-person families earning the median wage ($55,000) will pay 7.5 percent of it in federal income taxes this year — the lowest level in 30 years.

So where do all these dire statistics come from? Quinn takes on the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., which calculates Tax Freedom Day every year — the number of days you supposedly work for the government before you get to keep anything you make. May 10! This year, you have to work for the government for almost five and a half months before you get to keep a single dime! That's awful.

Except that the Tax Foundation bases this date on tax collections — tax collections rise when incomes and the economy do. "You're waiting longer for Tax Freedom Day this year because wages and stock-market profits are up," reports Quinn. Meaning your life is better, not worse.

If Tax Freedom Day were to start coming much earlier, it would mean the economy was in recession, with incomes and tax collections down. You'd get your "tax freedom" sooner, but you'd also be more likely to be unemployed.

This year, middle-income families with children get two important breaks: the child credit (several hundred dollars per child) and the credits that offset college tuition.

Thanks largely to these two breaks, average tax refunds are running at a record $1,589, up 15 percent from last year.

Low-income families benefit from the earned income tax credit, and even families with twice the median income, paying an average of 14 percent in income taxes, are at their lowest rate in 30 years.

The only people paying more in taxes are the top 20 percent, but their income has risen much faster than anyone else's. The top 1 percent take home double the real income they had in 1977, compared with real losses for people with middle incomes and less, reports Quinn.

But before you say, "Gosh, whoopee, how I love that IRS!" consider a few of the gross inequities that remain in the system. Payroll taxes — mostly meaning Social Security — now weigh more heavily than the income tax on most people and weigh most unfairly on the poor, then unfairly on the middle and not at all (whee!) on the rich.

Also dancing with joy these days are the corporations, which are paying their lowest share of the tax burden since the Gilded Age, having shifted it onto individual taxpayers by dint of many, many campaign contributions and much, much lobbying.

How much money are we talking? According to "America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?" by Don Barlett and Jim Steele: "If corporations in 1994 paid taxes at the same rate corporations did through the 1950s (a time when American business ruled), the U.S. Treasury would collect an extra $250 billion a year. That's two and one-half times as much as corporations presently pay in taxes."

That money would provide "a 60 percent tax cut for everyone with an income below $200,000" and "health care for everyone who is uninsured — and still have enough left over for a tax cut for individuals."

I like the exemption where a corporation gets to write off the value of its name when it merges. How come women don't get that when they marry? Harriet Smith marries Joe Jones and becomes Harriet Jones (or he becomes Joe Smith). There go all those years she put into making good grades at school, gaining a reputation for intelligence and industry, and then good grades in college. Ms. Smith was known for paying her bills promptly. For seven years, she was a first-rate teacher; all the parents wanted her for their kids; and then, there was her reputation for bringing excellent casseroles to the covered-dish suppers and being a really good sport about recess duty — now there's a reputation that's worth a big deduction.

Let's you and me and Joe and Harriet get us a lobbyist — because we sure don't have much representation in Congress.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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