appropriate hourly rate for short-term Web programming contract?

[Seth Gordon]

My wife works for a center at MIT, and they want to make some
improvements to their Web site, which would involve writing a number of
CGI scripts.  The scripts would not be terribly complicated; my wife
estimates that it would require about six or seven database tables to
keep track of everything.  My rough guess is that it would take me
between two and four weeks of full-time work to get it all done.

Her boss is willing to give the work for me, provided that she gets
competing bids and either goes with the lowest bid or gives a good
reason for not doing so.

What is a reasonable hourly rate (for a W-2 contract) for me to ask for
this work?  My wife got email from someone who would do the job for
$75/hour, which seems unusually steep even if it's a 1099 rate. 

-- 
"It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for
concealing the trival details of a program--such as where its bugs are."
  --David Keppel
// seth gordon // sethg at ropine.com // http://ropine.com/sethg/cv.html //