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Tax deal revives tobacco measure
By Mary Ann Akers
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
 enate GOP negotiators worked out a compromise late yesterday afternoon to alleviate the tax burden on working married couples, an issue that has stymied the massive anti-smoking legislation but now gives it new life.
The Senate is set today to consider the Republican plan and a competing Democratic alternative for wiping out the so-called marriage penalty, a wrinkle in the tax code that forces many couples to pay higher taxes than if they were single.
During debate yesterday, the Senate voted 52-46, strictly along party lines, to fold into the tobacco bill an $18 billion Republican anti-drug proposal.
The expected tax debate comes after Sen. Phil Gramm, Texas Republican, worked out a compromise late yesterday afternoon with budget and tax writers in the office of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to give relie
f to married couples making less than $50,000 a year.
Negotiators said the agreement could provide the needed kick to jump-start the stalled tobacco bill, which would raise $516 billion over 25 years to create anti-smoking programs and help states recover health-related claims by ill smokers.
"It moves us in a direction where I begin to see some daylight," said Senate Budget Committee
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Chairman Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican, even as he warned, "We're not there yet."
But while Mr. Gramm beamed at his progress, other conservatives privately expressed outrage that the Texas senator put himself in the precarious position of having potentially salvaged the tobacco legislation, which opponents have criticized as a liberal tax-and-spend, big-bureaucracy gold mine.
"So Gramm is responsible in some part for tobacco legislation having passed the Senate," said one senior Senate Republican aide. The aide said Mr. Gramm's compromise is still only a "teensy, weeny, teeny, weeny tax cut" compared with the "Paul Bunyan-sized tax increases" in the tobacco bill.
But Mr. Gramm, who was busy looking for votes last night, said even if his proposal passes the Senate, he still would not support the tobacco legislation, which he lambasted as a "big tax that hurts the victims instead of the victimizers."
The tobacco bill's author, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, said the progress made on the thorny issue of tax cuts keeps the legislation alive, but not comfortably so.
"Reports of the death of this legislation are premature," he said but added that "by no means" did he have "confidence we will reach a successful conclusion."
; President Clinton, meanwhile, who negotiated over the telephone yesterday with both Mr. Lott and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, remained optimistic that the developments on tax cuts would pave the way for final passage of a sweeping bill aimed at stopping teen-age smoking, while punishing the tobacco industry for what he characterized as its systematic approach to addicting consumers to its product.
"I do believe that the possibility of getting a comprehensive bill out of the Senate is greater now than it was this morning," Mr. Clinton said at an afternoon news conference. "There are still problems to be sure. But we are getting closer to, I think, a principled compromise. I hope we are."
The bill would raise the price of cigarettes by $1.10 a pack, give the Food and Drug Administration greater authority to regulate tobacco, curtail advertising and impose stiff penalties on cigarette companies that fail
to achieve targeted levels of reducing underage smoking.
The legislation has been bogged down by emotional partisan sniping that has threatened to derail the bill altogether. Mr. Lott said earlier this week he was inclined to pull the legislation from the floor and move on to other bills the Senate must pass before it adjourns this fall.
Mr. Gramm's compromise amendment would use $16 billion of the estimated $62 billion raised over the first five years of the tobacco legislation's implementation to give tax relief to married couples who file their taxes jointly. It would cost $30 billion over the next five years and would allow the self-employed to fully deduct their health insurance expenses.
The Democratic alternative, sponsored by Mr. Daschle of South Dakota, is aimed at double-income married couples making less than $60,000 who file their taxes jointly. It would allow them to deduct 20 percent from the lower salary.
; Mr. Daschle estimated it would cost $12 billion over the first five years. And like the GOP plan, it also would allow the self-employed to fully deduct their medical insurance expenses.
Mr. Daschle offered the amendment with reluctance. Most Democrats have expressed anger that what they consider the focus of the tobacco bill -- saving the estimated 3,000 children who begin smoking each day from dying of lung cancer and other tobacco-related illnesses -- has been lost to a debate over taxes.
The Senate approved an amendment by Sen. Paul Coverdell, Georgia Republican, to earmark $16 billion over the next five years for drug-fighting efforts, including new drug awareness and drug testing programs.
The money would increase the Coast Guard's budget to fight drug smuggling and provide $10 million a year in grants to states that instituted voluntary drug testing for teen driver
's-license applicants.
Indeed, debate on the tobacco legislation until yesterday had slowed to a near standstill while getting caught in a morass of parliamentary maneuvering.
Earlier yesterday, Republicans defeated 56-42 a Democratic attempt to limit debate and force a vote on final passage. Democrats said that would remain their strategy as long as the tobacco bill founders on the floor.
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