Coping With Taxes as April 15 Nears

Frankly, both my accountant and myself find taxes of $3,554 on the earnings of $9,802 from the investment set aside for my 6-year-old daughter’s college education to be exorbitant. It is clearly the policy of the 1986 tax reform law to create a strong disincentive to save for a child’s college education, thereby ensuring that the government will pick up some of the tab later on, or, more likely, that a university education will become more and more a privilege of the very wealthy. The taxes on my daughter’s earnings amount to nearly two months of my take-home pay!

And I can’t help wondering what environmentalists will have to say about California’s new requirement that taxpayers submit duplicate copies of their federal tax returns together with their state returns. How many trees is that going to cost us?

GEORGIANA F. COUGHLAN

Los Angeles