Here’s a weird switch for you: Democrats in Congress want to offer a generous tax cut to millions of families and Republicans like Tom DeLay are fighting the effort.
Yes, you read that right.
You’re well aware by now that congressional Republicans, in a last-minute move, altered the $350 billion tax cut plan to limit the child tax credit for families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625 so lawmakers could give a huge tax break for millionaires and billionaires.
This means that almost 12 million children — one out of every six kids in America, all of whom are in low-income families — got left behind by the new tax cut.
The move is hard to defend. It’s actually…[cue scary music] class warfare. The tax plan shifts nearly all the benefits to one group of people — the wealthy.
Congressional Democrats began work this week to expand the child tax credit to those the tax cut law left out. The cost is $3.5 billion, which is one percent of the cost of the overall tax cut Bush signed into law.
I figured this would be the kind of thing the Republicans in Congress and the White House would go for in a heartbeat. They love all tax cuts and they seemed genuinely embarrassed once word got out about what they had to done with the low-income limits for child tax credit in the first place. Indeed, when Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced a bill to rectify this injustice, a half-dozen Republican Senators quickly signed up as co-sponsors.
But then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) announced he would fight the effort in the House. As he explained it, he’d consider restoring the child tax credit for those left out of the original tax bill but only if Democrats agree to yet another big tax cut bill. Specifically, DeLay wants a permanent repeal of the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth over $2 million.
In fact, in talking to reporters yesterday, DeLay indicated that he has no interest in helping those low-income families who got nothing from the tax cut legislation.
“There are a lot of other things that are more important than that,” DeLay said. “To me, it’s a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don’t pay income tax.”
The guy is a world-class scumbag. Many of the low-income families left behind by the child tax credit law don’t pay income taxes, but they sure could use the same expanded tax credit that DeLay is more than willing to give to middle- and upper-income families. Not to mention the fact that 8.1 million low-income families who do pay income taxes will get literally no benefit from the latest round of Bush tax cuts.
Essentially, DeLay had a choice last week when the tax cut bill came up for a vote, and he chose more breaks for the wealthy over a small break for the poor. Now he has another choice — a small tax cut for the poor or nothing. DeLay prefers nothing. He is beneath contempt.