The American Prospect
by Robert Gordon & Josh Lynn

12/09/05

Progressive critics of the budget reconciliation bills now being melded together by a joint House-Senate conference committee usually attack the measures as tax breaks for the wealthy, paid for with budget cuts for the poor. That’s true, as far as it goes. Many of the cuts now being considered -- reductions in Medicaid, Food Stamps, and child support enforcement, together with increases in interest rates on student loans -- wouldn’t even finance one-seventh of the recent tax breaks for Americans making over $380,000. But progressives might get more traction by arguing a slightly different point: that conservatives are pushing to eliminate incentives for the work of poor Americans as a way to reduce taxes on the accumulated wealth of the most fortunate. In tax policy, many progressives already complain -- and rightly so -- that President Bush is shifting the tax burden away from capital and onto labor. But the argument equally applies to cuts in programs that provide work incentives by offering the working poor benefits like health care and child care...

http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=10704


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp