The Republicans have screwed the poor again :

A last-minute revision by House and senate leaders in the tax bill that President Bush signed today will prevent millions of minimum-wage families from receiving the increased child credit that is in the measure, say Congressional officials and outside groups.

Most taxpayers will receive a $400-a-child check in the mail this summer as a result of the law, which raises the child tax credit, to $1,000 from $600. It had been clear from the beginning that the wealthiest families would not receive the credit, which is intended to phase out at high incomes.

But after studying the bill approved on Friday, liberal and child advocacy groups discovered that a different group of families would also not benefit from the $400 increase ? families who make just above the minimum wage.

Because of the formula for calculating the credit, most families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625 will not benefit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, says those families include 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17.

How can any resonable person look at this and not realize the utter contempt the Republican party has for poor people? The fact that they’d remove a provision that would greatly improve life for extremely poor people in order to make room for more tax cuts for the rich just shows how soulless these bastards can be. How the hell can they sleep at night when 16% of American children are living at or below the poverty level?

The number of black youths living in extreme poverty is at its highest level in the 23 years that such statistics have been kept, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 932,000 blacks under age 18 are in that category, a 50 percent increase from the 622,000 classified that way in 1999, according to a Children’s Defense Fund analysis of Census Bureau data.

The advocacy group described children as living in extreme poverty if their family had an after-tax income below half the federal poverty threshold. The after-tax income includes the value of food stamps, subsidized school lunches and housing benefits.

For a family of three in 2001, the most recent year available, the poverty threshold was measured at $14,128, so the income level indicating extreme poverty for that size family would be a maximum of $7,064 a year.
. . .
J. Lawrence Aber, the center’s director, said extreme poverty has far more severe effects than mere poverty. Children living in extreme poverty enter school less ready to learn and have higher rates of illness, more social and emotional problems, and greater difficulty with language development.

The richest country in the world shouldn’t have these kinds of problems.