Editor's Note: TomPaine.com is pleased to introduce a special guest blogger this week. While executive editor Alex Walker is away on vacation, Beth Shulman will be blogging in her place. Shulman, a frequent TomPaine.com contributor, is a lawyer and author who is passionate about making the U.S. economy work for working people. Shulman’s book The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans was published in 2003.
In a recent analysis, the Tax Policy Center found that the Child Tax Credit program, the largest American child subsidy program at $47 billion dollars, fails to cover more than a quarter of America’s children (half of America’s black children). It fails to do so because their parents (three-quarters of whom are working) earn too little to pay taxes, which makes them ineligible for the $1,000 tax credit. Some qualify for partial payment, but half don’t qualify for anything. Conservatives don’t see any problem with this situation. Jason DeParle notes in yesterday’s New York Times (“Study Finds Many Children Don’t Benefit From Credits,” October 2, 2005) that conservatives argue that expanding the Child Tax Credit to these children would make the credit more of an anti-poverty program. As DeParle quotes Dan Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation, “People who don’t pay taxes, don’t get a tax cut.
The conservative position ignores that the purpose of the child tax credit program is to help children—especially those whose families have the least resources. It also exposes the great pretend: that a tax credit is somehow not providing money from our national treasury, whereas a benefit program is.
Time and again, we give handouts to the more well-off in the form of health care and housing write-offs—and we pretend that we are not giving away public monies. We call these credits write-offs or subsidies. And like the child tax credit, we aren’t talking about small sums. Two-thirds of the $140 billion in annual health care tax subsidies and most of the $70-$80 billion in pension plan subsidies go to higher-income Americans. Likewise, America provides $61 billion in housing subsidies to high and middle-income families in the form of mortgage deductions. This still leaves aside the estimated $125 billion a year that the federal government provides in corporate welfare in the form of tax abatements, price supports, tax shelters and subsidies.
But in one of the greatest perversities, lower-income working families—who earn too little to pay taxes, buy a house or open an IRA or whose employers fail to provide health care or a pension plan (and most low-wage employers do not!) —are shut out of this government largess. The people who need help the most just don’t get it. And adding to this duplicity is that when there is a move to expand housing vouchers or Medicaid or ensure that all children get the benefit of the largest American child subsidy, it is opposed by conservatives who label programs that help the most vulnerable among us as government handouts. Let’s stop the doublespeak. Money is money.
--Beth Shulman |
Monday, October 3, 2005 9:20 AM
