Five hundred dollars for Bill Gates? - tax credit for families with children - Column

National Review, May 1, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

It is a pity that over one hundred Republican congressmen have petitioned the leadership to modify their universal pledge to reduce taxation. The defecting congressmen were restive in the high atmosphere of principle, and so they dived off, and are now left to wrestle with expedience. Politicians aren't philosophers, and in that sense expedience is, so to speak, what they do. But it is disorienting to lose all contact with the illumination of philosophy, which in this case tells us: Equal treatment under the law. Not only for women and men, blacks and whites, but for rich and poor. The Contract with America calls for remitting to anyone who earns up to $200,000, and has a child under 18, $500 from his annual tax bill. There was temporizing even at the creation. Why ``up to $200,000''? The mere mention of that ceiling was an invitation to the hornets to come caviling in. And indeed they did. An hour does not pass without our hearing from such as Representative David Bonior that the entire Contract with America is a design to help the rich. Mr. Clinton has proposed reducing the ceiling to $75,000; and Republican moderates urge phasing out the tax credit between $95,000 and $120,000. That would save the Treasury, per year, $1.3 billion. Suppose that the Contract had placed no ceiling on the per-child tax relief? Granting that relief to everybody between $200,000 and Bill-Gates-rich would have cost an extra $400 million. Is it worth it to mutilate the idea of equal treatment under the law for the sake of four-tenths of a billion dollars? I'd go further, as a matter of fact: Would it be worth jiggling with equal treatment under the law to realize a trillion dollars? If the question were put before the defenders of the Bill of Rights, the answer would be a resounding No -- you must not impinge on freedom of speech anywhere, any time, because if you do, a principle is lost. No (we can hear them saying), you must not attenuate the Fifth Amendment, or the Fourth, because principles are principles. Surely there are exceptions? Yes, if somebody shouts Fire! in a crowded theater, that's one thing. Well, is Bill Gates, by threatening us with a $500 loss in federal revenues when he has a child, threatening the economic structure of America?

The Republican philosophers know that redistribution of a sort has been institutionalized during this century, removed from private charities to public dispensaries. So: x amount of money will be taken from those who have, in order to look after those who have not.

Now that is an understandable commitment. But to chip away at any piece of legislation, on the grounds that it is also going to favor those who Have, destabilizes the institutional mainframe. The city elders meet and decide to build a bridge and pay for it by charging 25 cents per car crossing. Will the local Bonior raise his voice to protest that the indigent driver in his jalopy headed for Tobacco Road is being charged the same amount of money as billionaire Bill Gates? If someone raises his hand to object that it isn't feasible to distinguish between the indigent farmer and Bill Gates, the Boniors of this world have at their disposal the easiest answer: the license plate. The annual income of the driver or owner can be communicated in a nanosecond, instructing the tollkeeper whether to charge that particular car 25 cents, or 25 dollars.

The generation of rich/poor friction animates the thought and talk of demagogues and damages the prospect of a society based on law. Once every year or every five years or whenever, the boundaries of redistribution should be defined. And from that moment until the next convention on the extent of redistribution, the question should be barred from the legislative floor. The question before the House today is whether to grant couples with children $500 of relief. It is immaterial (in the formal sense of the word) and irrelevant whether from such a measure here and there somebody benefits who is already rich.