The Stay At Home Tax Credit Act of 2003 (S. 1253) would give those parents a minimum tax credit of $200 for stay-at-home moms and dads, plus it would permit them to take the dependent care credit against the minimum tax. On top of those goodies, if it turned out that these tax breaks ended in them owing no taxes, the legislation would let them carry the unused portion of the dependent care credit forward toward the following year's taxes.

The freshman Senator from Alaska introduced this legislation earlier this month, and it has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee. At the moment, it has no co-sponsors. According to members of her staff, they are also still awaiting word from the Congressional Budget Office about how much this new tax break will cost.

It sounds like a peachy deal for stay at home parents, but the legislation has one gaping hole. The tax credits exclude any parent who is working from home, either as a telecommuter or as a home-based business owner-operator. And there is no minimum income requirement that work-at-home parents have to meet before they lose this credit. Even if your home-based business is only making $500 a year, you don't qualify.

It is a curious omission when you consider the justification for the legislation. Senator Murkowski said she did not think parents who gave up their careers and made the financial sacrifice to stay at home with their kids should not be penalized for that choice by the tax code. Currently, parents who work outside the home can take tax credits for dependent care expenses incurred for child care.

Stay at home parents who don't incur those expenses don't get the credit, even though they suffer financially from leaving the work force. "We should act now to eliminate the penalty imposed on families when a parent leaves the workforce to raise a child," Senator Murkowski said in her floor statement. This bill attempts to address both those issues.

Of course, there are usually some financial sacrifices involved in leaving a decent job so that you can be there for your kids, even if you do decide to start a home-based business. It's a relatively rare home-based business owner who can boast of business revenues that equal or surpass what they could have made if they'd stayed in the work force.

"If the point is to reward stay at home parents for making a financial sacrifice, then what of the home business owner who struggles for 2 years before making a profit?" asks Sharon Davis of 2Work-At-Home.com. "That's certainly more of a financial burden as there are expenses, but no income."

What all this means is that, if you work from home and don't pay somebody to watch your children while you work, then you weren't getting that tax credit. And, if your home-based business is making as little as $5 a year, you're not going to get this new one, either. This proposal unblushingly leaves work-at-home parents completely out in the cold.

Needless to say, the idea has gone over with the work-at-home parents crowd like a lead balloon.

Donna Schwartz Mills of the ParentPreneur Club agrees that the proposal would be a good thing for stay-at-home parents who choose not to try to divide their time between the family and the business, particularly if the $2,400 tax credit comes out to about equal what they would clear from a home-based business. But that's not often the case.

"I don't think that describes most wah's, who are really scraping by without the income they used to bring to the family," Ms. Mills says. "And it underlines one of the problems of being a grassroots type of phenomenon, without any kind of organized lobby to make the public aware of how big a part of the economy we are or to fight for the issues we believe in."

One person who wants to change that, and to make a larger noise on behalf of home-based businesses, is Chris Hansen, president of the Home Based Business Council and the SBA Office of Advocacy's 2003 Home-Based Business Advocate of the Year. And he isn't any happier about this proposal than anybody else in the home-based business community.

"Obviously, the junior Senator from Alaska knows nothing about families," Hansen said when he learned about the Murkowski bill. "It's amazing how ignorant legislators are about the cost-benefit ratio of working at home. This legislation is not well thought out."

Given the fact that practically every business in the country starts out life as a home-based business, that many home-based business operators make very little money and consider that their primary reason for being at home is to care for their kids, the way this bill is crafted is a bit of a slap in the face. It will be interesting to see whether anybody on Senator Murkowski's staff notices the omission and fixes it during mark up.

For that matter, given the current state of the federal budget, it will be interesting to see whether Senate Finance Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) even puts this one on his schedule. But, whether he does or not, the bill is another clear indication of the lack of stature that home-based business ownership still conveys among at least some of the folks on Capitol Hill.