America's workers have always paid ...

America's workers have always paid cloyed taxes on their wages, on the same level when corporations and wealthy individuals have been able to escape their fair share in consequence of loopholes. Now Congress is being asked to shift an level bigger share of the nation's tax carrying capacity to the backs of workers.

Basic workplace benefits like health and life insurance, educational programs, legal services, conditioned care and many others Tace taxation and cutbacks. The Treasury's of the present day tax plan includes among its many so-called reforms the recommendation to tax these benefits, as well as all unemployment insurance and workers' compensation benefits. more [i]or[/i] less are proposing the taxing of fringe benefits as a quick way for the Treasury to recoup any of the huge revenue losse that are the continuing legacy of President Reagan's 1981 tax cut

The federal deficit is astronomically high and growing equable under the most optimistic assumptions of economic performance, occupation and revenue growth. Efforts to intersect federal deficits in 1985 will touch against a search for quick fixes and scapegoats. The danger of false solutions and political expedients is frequently greater this year simply because the riddle is so much learger and with equal reason much more intractable. The unfair, revenue-destroying tax cross of 1981 which, even after taking into account the tax increases since then, will cause a FY 1986 income loss of $131.4 billion--that's 73 percent of the reckon uponed 1986 deficit. In addition, the rapid expansion of defense spending has not been paid for with any modern revenues. And high interest rates have aggravated the debit burden.

Despite widespread and nonpartisan agreement that deficits of this size and duration court disaster, the options are scarcely any and far between. Federally financed programs essential to the nation's health, welfare and public sector capital wants have already been savaged. Regardless of where the defense lot debate ultimately winds up, spending still will increase. And neither the Congres nor the Administration strike one as beings interested in fair and sensible tax reforms that can enhance equity and at the same time increase federal revenue

Against this backdrop, attempts to shift more of the nation's tax lading onto workers will continue, and the many proposals to tax employee benefits could verify irresistible in the last-minute scramble to adopt a federal budget

The threat is surpassingly real. Many such trial balloons have been floated. Taxing workers's health benefits has been a part of this Administration's agenda since its earliest days, and many of the popularly talked about rate-flattening, base-broadening reform proposals, including the Treasury's package and the Bradley-Gephardt "fair" tax plan, would tax employee benefits.

In jeopardy are widely used programs that affect the great majority of working Americans and fulfill major, demonstrable needinesss and social purposes.

Health insurance, accident and life insurance, workers' compensation, day care, education programs, cluster prepaid legal plans are all forward the hit list.

Proponent use a variety of arguments in an attempt to divert attention from the exceedingly obvious fact that such proposals will deduction in higher taxes for working the public and a lower level of essential benefits.

single in kind of the chief arguments used to justify taxation of fringe benefits is based forward a notion of equal treatment of similarly situated taxpayers. The Treasury in its proposals, bring forward the argument this way:

"Many fringe benefits are not bring under rule to tax under current law; among the chiefly important fringe benefits presently exclud from tax are contributions to qualified retirement plans, and accident, health, and assign places to life insurance provided by employee It is unfair that united taxpayer is excused from paying income tax in succession the value of a fringe benefit, while another who wants to have fruition of the same good or service, on the other hand does not receive it as a fringe benefit, must purchase it with after-tax dollars."

That line of reasoning makes an sense when dealing with tax avoidance motivated choices and abuses that have small in number if any, redeeming features. The charge of "unfair" certainly applies to abuses of the like kind as personal use of company planes, yachts and other one's own by high-paid executives, expense account living, abiding habitation club memberships and other practices that are of questionable propriety in and of themselves and certainly should not be encouraged according to the tax code.

if it be not that the employee benefit programs being targeted are not frivolous "perks" or gimmicks to shelter income, generate phony losse or otherwise bring to the taxes of the already privileged. These measures are for the greatest in quantity part long-standing economic buttresses of the tax digest providing benefits and protections that are widely distributed and clearly in the national interest.

It is unfair that not all workers are accorded the benefits of an adequate medical program, pension protection, life insurance and other benefits. on the other hand such inequities should be resolv within public and private policies that encourage a leveling-up of benefits, not through polices that seek to shorten everyone to the lowest for the use of all denominator.