TAX CUTS MUST BE CENTRAL GOP MESSAGE

Former Vice President Dan Quayle pointed to a disturbing fact this past week: The Social Security payroll tax was just 2 percent in 1949, when many of today's grandparents and great-grandparents were getting their families started. Today's families stagger along, forced to pay the same tax at more than 15 percent -- half paid by the worker and another half paid by the employer. This is just one of the many reasons why Americans are today taxed at the highest rates ever in peacetime.

So for this and many more reasons, Americans need a tax cut, the larger the better. Among the reasons Missourians need a tax cut at the state level can be summed up in two words: Mel Carnahan. Missouri's governor led a drive by his party to swell two major taxes his first year in office: income taxes and property taxes. None of the nickel-and-dime tax cuts he has done since then -- all forced on a reluctant governor by the Hancock Amendment -- are sufficient to make up for the tax increasing he did in his first year in office.

But back to the federal level. "Despite assurances of bipartisanship," read a recent Associated Press story datelined Washington, "a fierce struggle is brewing over the GOP's proposal for a 10 percent income tax cut that would swallow a chunk of the budget surplus."

Good. If "bipartisanship" means deep-sixing any serious effort to slash the crushing federal tax burden, then we have had quite enough of it, thank you. And if "partisanship" serves the cause of tax reduction, then bring it on. It is none too soon for congressional Republicans to remember why voters placed them in the majority more than four years ago. It certainly wasn't to bask and preen for accolades from liberal editorial writers and media commentators about "bipartisanship."

Voters placed Republicans in the majority and kept them there in two succeeding elections in order to shrink and bring to heel the permanent Washington establishment. And that work begins and ends with real, across-the-board tax cuts. Republicans forget this at their peril, as last fall's disappointing election results remind us.

"I pledge to you," House majority whip Tom DeLay told an audience last week, "this year the House leadership will fight tooth and nail to provide real tax relief to American families." Republican Sen. Rod Grams made the case in the GOP's weekly radio address that federal, state and local taxes now consume 40 percent of a typical family's budget. "You're working nearly three hours of each eight-hour day just to pay off your tax bill," Grams told his audience. "The across-the-board tax cut is fair, because we're not pitting one group of taxpayers against the other."

In addition to a 10 percent, across-the-board income-tax cut, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, wants to double the standard income tax deduction for joint returns. This would in effect eliminate the marriage penalty and give a greater tax benefit to married couples who now pay more than they would if single.

And beyond this, other GOP priorities include eliminating estate or inheritance taxes. "We must cut death taxes," said Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash., "so that families don't have to sell their businesses and farms when Mom and Dad die."

Amen to DeLay, Grams and Dunn. Americans will be watching to see whether congressional Republicans mean it. And that will take actions, not words, over the next 22 months leading up to the elections of November 2000. If Republicans spend this period recovering their reputations as committed tax cutters, especially over the implacable Democratic opposition now forming, that election day should take care of itself.