Tax cuts are in sight: but the average African-American will get less relief than the average white person.

Congress is determined to cut taxes, a move that some should cheer.

Unfortunately, the average African-American has less reason to cheer than the average white person. And worse, many blacks--those who occupy the lowest rung of the economic ladder--will actually be hurt if the pending tax reductions are matched by cuts in spending.

Such conclusions can be drawn from data prepared by Andrew F. Brimmer, a member of the BE Board of Economists, who heads his own Washington-based economics firm, Brimmer & Co.

The problem, according to Brimmer's numbers, is that a relatively large proportion of blacks are in the lower-income brackets and pay lower rates on their income taxes, or no taxes at all. Some of the tax cuts, though, are designed primarily to help people in the middle-income brackets.

One proposal, for example, would give every family a $500 tax cut per child. But if a family pays no income taxes (which is true of 16.4% of African-American households versus 6.4% of white households), the exemption has no meaning. And, if cuts are made in social programs to help offset the loss of tax revenues, many African-Americans would be far worse off than they are today.

In terms of straight income taxes, too, the average African-American would benefit less than the average white American. Brimmer points out that blacks paid $59 billion in income taxes in 1993, which was about half the amount they would have paid if their incomes had been on a par with those of whites.

That means that if income taxes were cut by 10%, the savings for African-Americans would be only $5.6 billion, while the savings for a comparable number of white Americans would be about $11 billion.

Brimmer slices the cake a number of ways to make his point. African-Americans, he says, account for 12% of the nation's households, but they pay only 5.9% of federal income taxes and 6.5% of state income taxes. These are "graduated" taxes, in that the greater a family's income, the greater the tax rate. These are the taxes Congress plans to cut.

On the other hand, blacks tend to pay about the same as whites in non-graduated taxes, such as Social Security and excise taxes. There are no plans to cut these taxes.

Of course, these numbers pertain to averages. Middle-income blacks would benefit as much as middle-income whites. This puts socially conscious middle-income Americans--black or white--in a dilemma: Should they support the proposed tax cuts for their personal interest, or should they oppose them out of concern for those at the bottom of the economic ladder?