Scarlett O'Hara, in Gone with the Wind, laid it out for us: "Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them."83 But timing matters in all things, and it turns out that those events, plus marriage, are related. That's what the empirical evidence shows. Do these impacts create social or economic losses for the country? 2. How might these influences conflict with the normal criteria for good tax policy? 3. How could revisions of tax structure reduce these influences on birth, marriage, and death?