« Federalism Hypocrisy by GOP on Labor | Main | Illinois: Where Democrats Can be Democrats »

June 04, 2003

Delay's Deception on Tax Credit

As Democrats demand a vote on giving the working poor the same child tax credit as middle class families, the GOP is lining up behind a simple refrain. Here is Tom Delay:

"There are a lot of other things that are more important than that," he said at a news conference. "To me, it's a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don't pay income tax."

Note the carefulness of the words, since of course, the working poor pay heavy payroll taxes (almost 15% of income if you count employer and employee parts) and at the state level, sales taxes.

And because the Congress won't help out states beyond the paltry few billion in the recent tax bill, sales taxes are going up across the country. It's worth checking out Who Pays, a report by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy to see just how heavy the burden is on the working poor. In Delay's Texas, for example, a family making $20,000 per year pays $1500 each year in sales taxes.

Where is their tax relief from this Congress?

They lied about who benefitted from the tax plan when they slammed in through Congress, and now they are lying about how undertaxed the working poor are.

But then they are just following the lies of their Commander in Chief.

Posted by Nathan at June 4, 2003 09:16 AM