Reclaiming The Tax Code For American Families

The House of Representatives Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families was created to provide an ongoing assessment of the conditions of American children and families and to make policy recommendations to Congress and the public. This report on the committee's 1991 activities includes summaries of 11 hearings, a list of witnesses and people who submitted testimony, highlights of legislation affecting children and families, and factsheets. The hearings focused on the following concerns: (1) reclaiming the tax code for American families; (2) generating innovative strategies for healthy infants and children; (3) community-based mental health services for children; (4) police stress and family well-being; (5) creation of a family-friendly workplace for fathers; (6) ways to help teenagers stay safe; (7) effects of noise on hearing loss in children and youth; (8) child abuse treatment and prevention in the 1990s; (9) National Children's Day; (10) comments of the Surgeon General on the prevention of underage drinking; and (11) automotive safety for American families. Most of the hearing summaries are followed by statistical factsheets, and minority position factsheets on health strategies for infants and children, police stress, and working fathers are provided. (AC)

Struggles to define the soul of America roil the nation's politics. Debates over the roles of gays, lesbians, women, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and disputes over reproductive and abortion rights serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups and their representatives in government. Although the American family lies at the core of these fierce battles, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture—a manifestation of the new right's late twentieth-century success in elevating "family values" over family economics. Gwendoline Alphonso makes a significant contribution to the prevailing understanding of party evolution, contemporary political polarization, and the role of the family in American political development by placing family at the center of political and cultural clashes. She demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the twentieth century have continually shaped not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state. Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the Progressive, post-World War II, and late twentieth-century periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties offers an intricate and sophisticated analysis of how deliberations around the ideal family became critical to characterizations of party politics. By revealing the deep historical interconnections between family and the two parties' ideologies and policy preferences, Alphonso reveals that American party development is more than a story of the state and its role in the economy but also, at its core, a debate over the political values of family and the social fabric it embodies.

Who stays late at the office when Mom leaves for a soccer match? Whose dollars pay for the tax credits, childcare benefits, and school vouchers that only parents can utilize? Who is forced to take those undesirable weekend business trips that Dad refuses? The answer: Adults without children--most of them women--have shouldered more than their share of the cost of family-friendly America. Until now.

This book is an overview of issues associated with the marriage penalty. The first section explains how the marriage penalty (and the marriage bonus) arises and why it is not possible to achieve simultaneously the goals of marriage neutrality and horizontal equity across families in a progressive tax system. The second section discusses the size of the marriage penalty, the bonus and importantly, the notion that the marriage penalty is not a precisely defined measure. The next section outlines the issues of equity, efficiency and simplicity that are part of the frame work for evaluating policy and the final section discusses various legislative proposals in light of these objectives. The book also estimates the effects of current tax policies on families of different types and sizes and analyses proposals to address the marriage penalty and the child tax credit. It contains a history of the development of tax provisions affecting the family.