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Show Grass Roots America Qj Can Create Injustice With the Best Motives By Jerry Martin A new 1972 tax law allegedly designed to aid working mothers is almost al-most a classic example of how government can create an injustice when it tries to eliminate one. Under this law, married mar-ried women who pursued a career before marriage mar-riage may return to work and deduct up to S4.800 a year or $400 a month for child care and household help. This part of the law is ' fine. It is an overdue over-due measure of tax justice just-ice for families in which a wife must work to make ends meet. The bad part is the fact that the deduction is limited to couples with an adjusted ad-justed gross income of less than SIS. 000. Above that amount, the deduction deduc-tion is wiped out gradually grad-ually until it disappears entirely if a couple has a combined income of $27,000 or more. The law does benefit most working mothers and for that, at least, we can be thankful. Yet it is totally unfai r to a group of working women America badly needs: the professionals. It's always difficult to elicit any sympathy or understanding under-standing for people who earn more than an aver age income. But a tax law that discriminates against working professional profes-sional women also hurts society. Everyone is concerned about the shortage of doctors and other highly skilled medical personnel: person-nel: the bacteriologists, medical technicians, the micro-biologists. Many of them are women. Even though they are small in numbers, America's Am-erica's women physicians physi-cians also perform vital services to society. The odds are almost overwhelming that a lady doctor or other woman professional will be married to someone in the professional ranks. It also is almost certain that their combined com-bined income will deny them the benefit of this tax dedcution other working wives receive for household help and child care. If a woman has the skill to earn, with her husband, a combined income in-come above the established estab-lished limits, why-should why-should the tax law s deny her the right to deduct her expenses for child care and household help? Her children need a baby-sitter, too. Discriminating against the women profession- als has other harmful side effects. If a woman physician doesn't practice prac-tice her patients must be added to the already-heavy already-heavy w ork load of othe r doctors. The household helper who might have been hired to look after a woman physician's children while she cares for the sick is denied an employment opportunity. oppor-tunity. That means more unemployment and possibly pos-sibly an addition to the welfare rolls of another unemployed domestic helper. In the end. society soc-iety could easily wind up paying more in welfare wel-fare or unemployment assistance to jobless domestic workers than it gets in taxes by denying deny-ing the full benefit of the child care deduction to working professional women w ith above average aver-age income. It's a cycle government's govern-ment's illogical tax policy pol-icy often generates. It's also unfair. The child care deduction should be granted to all working women, including the lady physicians and other oth-er professionals who earn above average income in-come if they practice the profession which took them many years of training and experience exper-ience to acquire. If the Women's Lib-' eralion Movement seeks a cause, this is one example of discrimination discrimina-tion against working wives that is well worth fighting to eliminate. |