President Reagan’s tax rate reduction – voted in three phases by Congress – has moved into its second stage, tanning cautious hopes for economic gains. During the next 12 months, the slash will total as much as $39 billion nationwide. according to an Associated Press dispatch. This, combined with a 7.4 percent increase in Social Security benefits, could pump roughly a billion dollars a week into the economy. The President envisions that if most of that money is spent, it could fire up idle factories resulting in the rehiring of laid-off workers. Unemployment has become crucial in the present recession and its impact is being felt severely in Utah in such plants as Kennecott Copper and Geneva Steel. . Americans will be watching hopefully. On a more personal basis, they’ll be examining paychecks to see how their own individual families will benefit from the cut, In many cases anticipation is sure to exceed realization. The Treasury says the increase in takehome pay will be about $6 a week for a married worker with two children and earnings of just over $24.000 a year. It could be as little as 40 cents for some workers at the bottom of the ladder. Much of the second stage cut, of course. already is eaten up by inflation. higher Social Security taxes, and two years of “bracket creep.” The latter Treasury explains, is an inflationary bias in the tax code under which workers must pay higher tax rates as their income rises even though buying power may remain unchanged because of higher consumer prices. When the three-stage reduction is fully effective in 1984. it will have slashed individual tax rates an average of 23 percent. Taxes were cut by about 1.25 percent and withholding rates reduced by 5 percent last Oct. 1. The third stage will be a 10 percent slash in withholding Julyl 1983. So while Reagan’s program doesn’t make a dramatic impact with the average worker. it softens what the tax picture otherwise would have been. Another touch of optimism came with the July 1 report that the government’s main gauge of future economic strength rose slightly in May, the third consecutive monthly advance. The White House saw this as evidence of a slow recovery from the recession. Some private economists are more cautious. On another front, an AFL-CIO study assailed the Reagan tax program, calling it a hoax on the working people and charging that only families making more than $100,000 a year will realize a net reduction from the second stage tax cut. The study concluded that despite last fall’s 5 percent cut in income tax rates and this year’s 10 percent, the vast majority of families will be paying more taxes in 1982 than in 1980 when the higher Social Security tax and increases in state and local taxes are figured. That may well be true, but their situation obviously would have been worse tax-wise without the Reagan cut. 1 The personal tax rate reduction and deep business tax cuts are at the heart of the Reagan plan for economic recoveryl Americans will be pulling for the program’s success A!