$87 Billion in Debt

If you pay taxes, you probably know about the child tax credit. That's the $1,000-per-child break you can get from the government if your family income is $110,000 or less. It's Uncle Sam's tiny (very tiny) way of helping out parents. (Above $110,000, the credit progressively phases out, to zero for those making over $149,000. Since it's the tax code, nothing's ever easy, so there are also small adjustments for multiple children.)

There is one other category of parents -- other than the affluent -- that gets no child tax credit: The working poor. Families that earn less than $10,750 a year aren't eligible for it. According to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities (CBPP), full-time work at the minimum wage -- which has been stagnate for years at $5.15 an hour -- pays $10,300 a year.

(By the way: if the minimum wage had risen as quickly as CEO pay has since 1990, today it would be $15.71 per hour. A family with a full-time minimum-wage earner would be living not on $10,300 a year, but $31,420.)

Now Congress is moving toward doing something about this glaring injustice.

Yes, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to extend the child-tax credit to those long-denied it: Families making ... from $110,000 to $309,000 a year.

This latest brilliant DeLay-Bush-Republican "reform", according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, will over the next decade add $69 billion to the already-towering Dubya deficits -- just for giving more high-income families, who've already been the big winners in the President's tax giveaways, one more freebie. CBPP, noting that this is money borrowed at interest, adds that the cost rises to $87 billion when the interest payments are taken into account.

For comparison, $87 billion is more than half the cost of our wars to date in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that's the price tag for just one small, obscure moment in the George W. Bush bacchanalia of borrowing at interest (in our name) so he can throw money at us.

The result of this reform, if passed into law? Three million new children will bring home tax credits for their families. All of them will be from affluent families. Not one will be from a working poor family.

And when it comes time to pay for this $87 billion giveaway to our wealthiest? Simple. The Bush-DeLay Republicans can cut federal programs for low-income families and children.

* * *

By the way, a member of Congress earned, on average, $158,100 last year. Which means he or she under current law has just missed the child-tax credit. (Or maybe, if he or she has a working spouse, they missed it by a fairly wide margin.)

But it doesn't have to be that way. Among those the Bush-DeLay reform would make eligible for another tax break are, CBPP notes archly, the families of "most Members of Congress who have children."

Well, full-speed ahead then! Members of Congress already have free health care, a six-figure paycheck, a sweet pension and other bennies -- does it make sense for them to cut-and-run now?

Comments (0)