Del of Freespeech.com has pointed me towards this article in the Wall Street Journal that explains why the poor don’t deserve tax cuts (I’m skipping a lot here, so I suggest you read the whole article) :

This is the essence of the uproar over the shape of the child-care tax credit. The tax bill the President signed last week increases the per child federal income tax credit to $1,000, up from the partially refundable $600 credit passed in the 2001 tax bill. But Republican conferees decided that the increase will not be paid out to those too poor to have any tax liability to begin with.
. . .
We raised some hackles last year when we noted this growing trend that more and more Americans paid little or no tax. “Lucky duckies,” we called this non-taxpaying class at the time. Notwithstanding liberal spinners, after this tax bill they’re even luckier.

My skin crawls at the thought that people who are so poor that they don’t pay any taxes are considered “lucky”. Here’s an idea : If the poor have it so good, I’m sure the writer of this article would love to switch places with one of the “lucky duckies” that don’t have to pay any taxes. There are plenty of ways I could describe what it was like when I was younger working a crappy minimum wage job, living in a subletted garage, and eating nothing but ramen noodles and macaroni, but “lucky” would be at the bottom of the list. At least I didn’t have a family to support (and still don’t).

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the rich who have been the lucky ones. Between 1955 and 1989, the tax rate for the richest 1% went down from 85.5% to 26.7% while the median tax rate jumped from 9.1% to 24.4%. Conservatives argue that it’s not fair for the rich to be paying a higher percentage than the poor, while liberals will argue that it’s not fair for the tax burden to be shifted from the rich to the middle and lower class. Personally, I think if you’re one of the few who’s lucky enough to be rich, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to give a little bit more back to the society who helped make you rich. This is an ideological difference however, and I don’t think arguing by either side is going to change a thing.

The big problem with these tax cuts isn’t who deserves more. Those kind of arguments may have made sense in 2001 when Bush was giving away the Clinton surplus. After all, we were at peace, the economy was doing okay, and the government had extra money. Now things are a little different. The way Bush has sold this tax cut, it isn’t about fairness, it’s about helping revive the economy. (Of course, this is from the same guy who claimed that Saddam Hussein was a”‘clear and immediate threat”, so you’ll understand if I suspect some ulterior motives here.)

That said, a tax cut for the wealthy isn’t going to accomplish what the president claims it’s going to do. As I pointed out in this post, if Bush was serious about helping the economy, putting money in the hands of the poor is a better solution than cutting taxes for the rich. Whether you call it “redistribution of wealth”, “stealing from the rich”, or just plain “welfare”, cutting taxes for the richest 1% of taxpayers and leaving the poor out of the mix isn’t going to have the positive effect on the economy that it’s proponents claim it will and it’s not going to create 1.4 million jobs. As Paul Krugman said, there’s far better ways to create jobs than cutting taxes for the rich :

Still, let’s pretend that the Bush administration really thinks that its $726 billion tax-cut plan will create 1.4 million jobs. At what price would those jobs be created?
. . .
The average American worker earns only about $40,000 per year; why does the administration, even on its own estimates, need to offer $500,000 in tax cuts for each job created? If it’s all about jobs, wouldn’t it be far cheaper just to have the government hire people? Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration put the unemployed to work doing all kinds of useful things; why not do something similar now? (Hint: this would be a good time to do something serious, finally, about port security.)

We’ve been dealing with this trickle down supply side bullshit for years now and I have yet to see how this is actually “trickling down”. When are Americans going to understand how flawed the cause/effect relationship between cutting taxes and creating jobs really is? If the Republicans (who are so concerned about “school accountability”) really believe that cutting taxes for businesses and the wealthy will help the poor, then why don’t they put their money where their mouths are? Why don’t they pass a tax cut that puts limits on investing the money overseas or provide tax credits for businesses to create new jobs?

Considering how cash strapped the national and local economies are, did it ever occur to them that right now is probably a bad time to be reducing the amount of money that the government has to spend? Wouldn’t that money be better spent on homeland security, securing democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, first responders, overseas counterterrorism measures, or even explaining to us what the hell we’re supposed to be doing during an “orange alert”?