Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/18/2003 12:13:00 AM (Archive Link)
You may already be familiar with the row that occurred recently over the child tax credit. As part of the overall tax cut package, the Republicans increased the credit for having kids by $400 per child. However, at the last moment, they decided to make this not apply to people who don’t pay taxes in the first place… families with incomes between $10,500-$26,625. If you have kids and fall into this income bracket, you already don’t pay income taxes and if you do, it sure ain’t much. This makes sense. If you don’t pay taxes, what is there to cut? You especially don’t want the cut to act so that the non-payers get refunded the money. In other words, so that even if you don’t pay taxes, you get a $400 refund check anyway. Since the purpose of tax cuts is that the government is allowing you to keep more of your money, this methodology would mean that other people are getting to keep more of your money. More than that, it acts as a form of welfare. It’s absurd! And yet, it’s exactly what the Left wants to do. And sadly, it's also exactly what’s happening. After the political uproar, the Republicans caved because of the bad publicity. So let’s look at some of that uproar.

Check out this editorial from Time’s Joe Klein. He himself admits that the people cut out of the original Senate tax cut package don’t pay taxes… but they should get money anyway! To quote, “So the Republicans decided that the working poor, who pay little or no income taxes — families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625--should not receive the expanded child tax credit. Almost 12 million children were effectively denied stipends of up to $400.” That 12 million children figure was also pulled out of thin air. I’d like to see the supporting math for it. But, of course, when you want to make a point, make sure you can make it look like kids will be hurt and the more, the better. Klein continues, “Indeed, it was ironic, and fairly nauseating, to hear spokesman Ari Fleischer argue last week that this was a matter of principle: the money should go to people who actually pay income taxes.” Well, yeah. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and tax cuts go to people who pay taxes. Klein says that Ari’s comment was nauseating because Bush campaigned so hard in favor of the poor and as he says, “The Republicans have never been defenders of the poor.”

This brings us to another issue. Do Democrats really defend the poor or just use them? To the Left, defending the poor means throwing money at them. More generally, it means throwing government money at the problem of poverty. People are poor and that’s bad, so what we need is a lot of dollars from Uncle Sam to “solve” it. Klein also wants to guilt people into taking care of the poor:

“In 1997 Wehner — a devout Evangelical — wrote a courageous Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post that began with a question: ‘During His ministry, Christ spoke out most often about (a) the evils of homosexuality, (b) the merits of democracy, (c) family-friendly tax cuts or (d) the danger of riches? It turns out Christ said nothing about the first three and a lot about the last one. But you would never know it based on the rhetoric of many modern-day Christians — particularly politically active ones.’ Wehner recounted some of the most famous New Testament parables in which Jesus castigates the wealthy, and he concluded, ‘It's unwise for Christians to keep averting our gaze from warnings that Christ placed in bright neon lights.’”

This is all true. The problem, though, is that according to the Left, the federal government must take money from people and then apply it to Welfare programs. When Jesus spoke about giving money to the poor, it was in the sense that you had to make the choice to give it. There’s not much spiritual point in being forced to be charitable. Jesus also said to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to give unto God what is God’s. The viewpoint Klein is taking here is that you should give everything to Caesar and then he’ll figure out what to give to God. That doesn’t exactly roll down to the individual so that it counts in the big book’s “good deed” column. Also, in the case of the U.S. government, Caesar is terribly inefficient. For every dollar that’s paid into welfare, about 60% of it is eaten up in administrative costs. That mean that only 40 cents on the dollar is actually getting to the people it’s supposed to help. Contrast this with a private charity like the Salvation Army which has overhead of just 20%. That means 80 cents of every dollar paid in is put to use in serving the poor and needy. And government welfare programs are notoriously bad at getting people off welfare. In some states, you can actually have a higher income by taking money from Uncle Sam than you can from working a full-time minimum wage job. That’s hardly an incentive to be a productive member of society.

I could go on about how welfare does far more to hurt the poor to help. However, given that and the fact that the government handles cash in a typically inefficient bureaucratic way, we’d be far better off just getting rid of public welfare programs (in which the federal government doesn’t have any business being involved anyway) and relying on private charities. They existed long before national welfare and were the social safety net. They’re efficient and have personal commitments to the people they help. They endeavor to help people out of poverty instead of just forking over cash and allowing the poor to stay that way. Americans have always been a charitable people, more so than any other culture, past or present, and would increase giving when they have more of their own money to give.

Another note on Klein’s Christ-based appeal is how he notes Jesus’ extensive preaching about the danger of riches. Klein apparently believes that it is the government’s responsibility to save us from this potential sin by taking our riches from us. Again, that policy is hardly saving anybody’s soul. And given what government welfare has done to keep down the poor, it looks far more likely that it can only hurt our chances for the Pearly Gates.