Republicans Screw Low-Income Citizens - Part II

From Yesterday's NY Times:

"A new study by groups critical of the tax law that President Bush signed on Wednesday has found that 8 million mostly low-income taxpayers will not receive any benefit from the law. Republicans have said for weeks that the new tax law was designed to benefit all those who pay income taxes. This is the second time since Congress passed the bill that critics have pointed out how some of its provisions would not help millions of people in the lowest tax brackets. In response to earlier disclosures about the complex bill's fine print, the Senate's chief Republican writer of tax legislation said on Friday that Congress should revise at least some of the law's provisions, involving child tax credits, to broaden their effect. The new analysis says that the taxpayers who get nothing from the tax law are primarily low-income single people who do not have children and lack income from dividends or capital gains. A large number of low- and moderate-income single parents with children over 16 will also get no benefit from the law, because it did not change the tax rate for such parents who are unmarried. In combination with the children who were cut from the bill's benefits by the Congressional negotiators, the study says, there are 50 million households — 36 percent of all households in the nation — who will receive no benefit from the tax law. The figure includes people who do not earn enough to owe income tax. But the study's authors noted that there are 40 times as many taxpayers who get no benefit from the cuts as there are millionaires who will get 44 percent of the law's tax benefits in 2005."

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