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<< South Korea Shifts Left | Main | A Study in Corporate Abuse >> April 16, 2004Max on Tax CreditsMax has a good response to my post on Kerry's tax credits. The problem with tax credits, as Max points out, is that the IRS is not a very competent social worker. Their eligibility rules are confusing for different credits and poorer folks can be quite intimidated by dealing with them to get their money. All true and in an ideal world, we'd just have universal health care and child care paid for by the Health and Human Services Department. But if Kerry can politically sell $200 billion in "tax credits" for education and health care where he might be able to push through only $100 billion in direct spending on the same, the tax credit gambit still looks attractive. Maybe that's not the tradeoff, but it's still worth understanding what Kerry is proposing and debating both its efficacy as policy and its merits as a political strategy. I said that Kerry's "spending cap" rhetoric is bad, but if he can sell hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending in the guise of "tax cuts", I'll still be happy with the results. Maybe the next step will be to hire a social worker division for the IRS. Posted by Nathan at April 16, 2004 09:34 AM Related posts:
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsIt's not the IRS. It's Congress who writes the laws. The IRS is perfectly capable of sending checks to people according to clear and simple rules. I agree that not all such benefits should necessarily be administered by the IRS, but that's a different matter. Posted by: Max at April 16, 2004 12:51 PM Although social spending has just as many, if not more, eligibility complications for different benefits as the tax system. The only thing that makes the complicated rules for social spending a little less onerous is the existence of case workers and other individuals who often guide applicants through the maze of benefits. Not that cutbacks there haven't made figuring out social spending often more of a nightmare than filling out an IRS form. There's some argument that an afternoon spent working through an IRS form could be a far more attractive option than sitting through many social worker interviews. Posted by: Nathan Newman at April 16, 2004 01:21 PM Post a comment
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