Marriage Penalty
By Len Burman
Essays on Economics in Government is a series of occasional essays in which all SGE members are welcome to contribute original essays which draw upon and recall special experiences during their time in government.
Although being Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Analysis is in many ways a dream job for a public finance economist who cares about policy, the hours were nothing to write home about. I held that position from 1998 to 2000. A normal shift was 8:00am to 8:00 pm, but there were also many very late nights. Even away from the office, I was always on call.
Some of my colleagues took pride in the insane hours. One late night, as we were faxing a memo to Secretary Rubin’s home for him to read on his ride to work next morning, my collaborator on the memo told me that I should also send the document around by email so everyone would know that it had been sent at 3am. I didn’t. My view was that working at 3am was a sign of failure rather than success, but my views were not the norm.
As difficult as things were at Treasury, White House staff were basically indentured servants. My friends at the National Economic Council (NEC) would routinely get assignments at the office at 10pm, and would sometimes get a tongue-lashing for not working hard enough at 2am! Michael Waldman, President Clinton’s speechwriter, recounted in POTUS Speaks how he and a colleague were working on a speech at 3am about the importance of parents spending time with their children. Both men had small children at home who they rarely saw awake, and both broke down in tears. Then, they got back to work. The speech was no doubt inspiring.
My signature moment happened one night in 2000. Remarkably, I had managed to get home at a reasonable hour, and my wife and I celebrated the occasion by going to sleep around 9pm. At 10, my pager started vibrating on my dresser. Bleary eyed, I looked at the number (this was before text pagers made it to Treasury). The call was from the NEC. It was not appended “911”—code for emergency— so I turned off my pager and went back to sleep.
At 11, my wife and I were awakened by the telephone. It was the Treasury Operator, connecting a call from the White House. My NEC friend, Jason, was calling to tell me that the President was giving a speech the next day on marriage penalties in the tax code. (Marriage tax penalties arise when a couple pays more tax if married than they would if they filed two single returns. Marriage penalties were a hot issue in 2000.) Jason needed me to fact-check the assertions that he had made up. And, by the way, why didn’t I answer the page? Sleep was not considered a good excuse. I immediately wondered why the leader of the free world couldn’t get more than 13 hours advance notice about his speeches, but I knew that this White House was always fine-tuning its message. Tax policy was considered a major political tool to demonstrate how the President was “feeling your pain.” A constant string of proposals was intended to show that the President, at the time facing impeachment in the Congress, was still in charge and making policy. With luck, one might even move Monica Lewinsky off the front page for a day.
I did not want to wake up the experts on my staff who would have had the facts at hand, and I figured that I had enough information in spreadsheets and talking points on my computer that I could calculate what I needed. The only problem was that my reawakening was not totally successful. I was in a deep fog. It took me hours to figure out what the correct statistics were. Since the facts were not anywhere near dramatic enough for a Presidential speech, I then had to negotiate with the White House for another hour over language. Finally, at 3am, I headed back to bed.
My wife, Missie, was sitting up in bed reading— a bad sign, because she is not a night person. She just couldn’t sleep after the phone call, no doubt thinking about the joys of being spouse of a political appointee. When she saw me, her eyes got very narrow. She smiled in a very unpleasant way and said, “Do you want to talk about marriage penalties?” Overnight, something else moved to the front of the President’s agenda. He never gave the marriage penalty speech.
Len Burman is a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute, Co-director of the Tax Policy Center, and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. From 1998 to 2000, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the Treasury Department.