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The net effect of the bill on work is a subject of reasonable debate. The “lookback” provision, for one, might cause some households to drop out of the labor force, though they would still be able to draw benefits based on the previous year’s work. On the other hand, it might make some households more eager to earn, because one year’s work would bring them two years of credits.

For many of the conservative opponents, though, the empirical claims are secondary to a principled argument: They think it’s wrong to provide benefits to households that don’t pay income taxes. That’s “welfare,” according to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and former vice president Mike Pence’s new think tank. They mean it to be a fighting word.

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In making this argument, these conservatives are going back to 47-percent-ism. But it was always foolish to fixate on who pays income taxes and who doesn’t. Back in 2012, Romney was drawing on a vein of conservative thought that held that people who don’t pay income taxes will become carefree supporters of bigger government. U.S. history doesn’t bear out that worry: The percentage of nonpayers has gone up and down without having any obvious effect on voting behavior. Besides, the income tax isn’t the only tax on labor: For most Americans, payroll taxes are a heavier burden.

Supposedly, payroll taxes finance Social Security and Medicare while income taxes fund most of the rest of the federal government. But that’s an accounting fiction: Income taxes have helped pay for old-age benefits and payroll taxes have helped pay for the military. If FICA comes out of your paycheck, you’re a taxpayer. And if the government takes less out of your paycheck or gives you a bigger refund, you’re getting tax relief.

Then there’s a final fear raised against any expansion of the child credit for households with no income-tax liability: It’s a step toward a universal basic income, which conservatives generally find revolting. It’s welfare for everyone, after all. And there are proponents of UBI who say the child credit is a step toward their goal.

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But that political thinking is confused. The child credit, under this bill, would continue to go only to households with kids where at least one parent has recently been employed. The weak spot of a universal basic income is that it would have the government give money to people who are neither employed nor raising kids. If we had a large child credit linked to work, the case for a UBI for everyone else would rest on its least-sympathetic recipients.

Anyway, Congress is not voting on a universal basic income. It is voting on a modest, bipartisan and temporary set of tweaks to existing tax policies. It should pass the bill because it will do some good — and because it will help to bury a bad idea.

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Twelve years ago, the Republican Party was having a fling with Ayn Rand. Paul D. Ryan, the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012, kept dividing Americans into “makers” and “takers,” the former being productive taxpayers and the latter what Rand, in her didactic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” referred to as the leeches, looters and moochers. A few weeks before the election, the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, was caught on tape writing off the 47 percent of the population who paid no income taxes as people who are “dependent on government” and would never vote for him.

Republicans have moved on from that mind-set, partly because Romney’s remarks were immediately recognized as an election-defining gaffe and partly because Donald Trump, four years later, accelerated the party’s shift toward a new voting base without college degrees. Ryan repudiated his old rhetoric before becoming House speaker. Romney, now a senator from Utah, has sponsored a proposal for a federal child benefit that includes households with earnings too low to pay income taxes.

But the party’s old way of thinking hasn’t completely died out. Some Republicans are slipping back into old habits as they oppose a bipartisan tax bill. The new legislation, which passed the House by a wide margin on Wednesday evening but awaits a vote in the Senate, extends some business tax breaks that would otherwise expire and expands the tax credit for children. Inflation has eroded a lot of the credit’s value in recent years. The bill protects it from further erosion during the next two years.

The bill also makes the credit more generous to parents with low incomes — and that’s what has caused controversy on the right. Current law gives the credit only to households that report income this year, so as to encourage work. The bill loosens this requirement. If a family’s income drops from one year to the next, for example, the bill would let it use the higher year’s income to qualify for a bigger credit.

The net effect of the bill on work is a subject of reasonable debate. The “lookback” provision, for one, might cause some households to drop out of the labor force, though they would still be able to draw benefits based on the previous year’s work. On the other hand, it might make some households more eager to earn, because one year’s work would bring them two years of credits.

For many of the conservative opponents, though, the empirical claims are secondary to a principled argument: They think it’s wrong to provide benefits to households that don’t pay income taxes. That’s “welfare,” according to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and former vice president Mike Pence’s new think tank. They mean it to be a fighting word.

In making this argument, these conservatives are going back to 47-percent-ism. But it was always foolish to fixate on who pays income taxes and who doesn’t. Back in 2012, Romney was drawing on a vein of conservative thought that held that people who don’t pay income taxes will become carefree supporters of bigger government. U.S. history doesn’t bear out that worry: The percentage of nonpayers has gone up and down without having any obvious effect on voting behavior. Besides, the income tax isn’t the only tax on labor: For most Americans, payroll taxes are a heavier burden.

Supposedly, payroll taxes finance Social Security and Medicare while income taxes fund most of the rest of the federal government. But that’s an accounting fiction: Income taxes have helped pay for old-age benefits and payroll taxes have helped pay for the military. If FICA comes out of your paycheck, you’re a taxpayer. And if the government takes less out of your paycheck or gives you a bigger refund, you’re getting tax relief.

Then there’s a final fear raised against any expansion of the child credit for households with no income-tax liability: It’s a step toward a universal basic income, which conservatives generally find revolting. It’s welfare for everyone, after all. And there are proponents of UBI who say the child credit is a step toward their goal.

But that political thinking is confused. The child credit, under this bill, would continue to go only to households with kids where at least one parent has recently been employed. The weak spot of a universal basic income is that it would have the government give money to people who are neither employed nor raising kids. If we had a large child credit linked to work, the case for a UBI for everyone else would rest on its least-sympathetic recipients.

Anyway, Congress is not voting on a universal basic income. It is voting on a modest, bipartisan and temporary set of tweaks to existing tax policies. It should pass the bill because it will do some good — and because it will help to bury a bad idea.

QOSHE - Some Republicans go back to fighting the ‘takers’ - Ramesh Ponnuru
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Some Republicans go back to fighting the ‘takers’

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01.02.2024

Follow this authorRamesh Ponnuru's opinions

Follow

The net effect of the bill on work is a subject of reasonable debate. The “lookback” provision, for one, might cause some households to drop out of the labor force, though they would still be able to draw benefits based on the previous year’s work. On the other hand, it might make some households more eager to earn, because one year’s work would bring them two years of credits.

For many of the conservative opponents, though, the empirical claims are secondary to a principled argument: They think it’s wrong to provide benefits to households that don’t pay income taxes. That’s “welfare,” according to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and former vice president Mike Pence’s new think tank. They mean it to be a fighting word.

Advertisement

In making this argument, these conservatives are going back to 47-percent-ism. But it was always foolish to fixate on who pays income taxes and who doesn’t. Back in 2012, Romney was drawing on a vein of conservative thought that held that people who don’t pay income taxes will become carefree supporters of bigger government. U.S. history doesn’t bear out that worry: The percentage of nonpayers has gone up and down without having any obvious effect on voting behavior. Besides, the income tax isn’t the only tax on labor: For most Americans, payroll taxes are a heavier burden.

Supposedly, payroll taxes finance Social Security and Medicare while income taxes fund most of the rest of the federal government. But that’s an accounting fiction: Income taxes have helped pay for old-age benefits and payroll taxes have helped pay for the military. If FICA comes out of your paycheck, you’re a taxpayer. And if the government takes less out of your paycheck or gives you a bigger refund, you’re getting tax relief.

Then there’s a final fear raised against any expansion of the child credit for households with no income-tax liability: It’s a step toward a universal basic income, which conservatives generally find revolting. It’s welfare for........

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