Of course, it's $600 if you're a married couple and $500 if a single parent with children. And rumors vary between 90 and 100 million personal income tax payers that fit one or the other of these categories. Let's see, with the Labor Department reporting 141 million working people, that must mean that a lot of them don't pay taxes or don't make enough to qualify for this break. And, at best that would be about $30 billion returned to taxpayers for fiscal 2001, not counting the single people with children so let's add another ten billion for them and make it a $40 billion tax cut.

Trouble is, the federal government overcharged us $87 billion last year, fiscal 2000. This year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is estimating $112.5 billion in income tax overcharges. Aha, but that includes corporate income taxes too, taxes that we all pay when we buy goods and services because the corporate cost is built into the end price.

Take out 20 percent for corporate and excise taxes and what have you got, a $70 billion overcharge for fiscal 2000 and $90 billion in surplus income taxes this year? If we get $40 billion back it still seems at least $50 billion short of the mark to me. It still looks like less than half a tax break.

But the tax brackets are scheduled to be changed too, aren't they? For instance, what's presently a 15 percent tax bracket is scheduled to be reduced to 10 percent of your salary over the next ten years. Some of that is going to go into effect this year without changing anything next year. Without giving us another partial reduction until the year after, in 2003.

Will this year's bracket reduction be enough make up for the extra half of our taxes we're not getting back? Does it account for the other half of the surplus the CBO predicts? With only a few months to go until the government's fiscal year end on September 30, I doubt it. Will we be able to claim it as a deduction next April? This all remains to be seen, doesn't it?

And since the brackets will not change at all next year, what does it mean in terms of the $122 billion surplus the CBO was predicting for next year? Oh, well.

Suspicious character that I am, what bothers me most is that politicians seem to be telling us that more tax cuts will probably come in the near future. This is just the first of many great things we can expect from the new administration. Dangling more hope in front of us.

I don't know about you, but if the wife and I get a $600 check in the mail it's just enough to cover one month's winter heat on the old family house we decided to keep. A house built when utilities were not even a consideration and landlords included them in the rent. The refund is not going to make me go out and buy a new car or a newer house.

When we've got a government that can raise taxes any time it wants and generate extra revenue in the billions overnight by selling bonds and other securities, I can't help wondering why they need to keep so much extra cash on hand.

Can you live with the idea that half a carrot is better than nothing? Yassuh, thank ya massah.

I could almost live with it if it weren't for the fact that the mothers are also stealing 16 percent of our payroll taxes and that this makes up most of their anticipated trillion dollar surpluses.