Nighttime Must-Read: Tim Noah: No, Today’s Republicans Do Not Like the EITC. Why Do You Ask?

Tim Noah: The partisan divide over the Earned Income Tax Credit: “President Obama’s new budget increases spending on and expands eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit,

the largest and most successful government assistance program for the working poor. The much-praised House GOP tax reform introduced last week would cut the EITC, even though a House GOP report excoriating most federal assistance to the poor singled out the program for applause. This new partisan difference over the EITC… speaks volumes…. Welfare reform should have ended the partisan scrimmage over welfare dependency. Instead, it merely shifted the goalposts. Previously, the GOP had praised the ‘deserving’ (i.e., working) poor even as it derided the ‘dependent’ (i.e., welfare-collecting) poor…. Republicans… rebrand[ed] as ‘dependent’ any low-income person who collected government assistance, even if that person also had a job…. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s tax reform… would in effect replace the EITC with a payroll-tax exemption up to $4,000 and impose various restrictions… would cut this highly-regarded program by $217 billion over the next decade. Robert Greenstein, chairman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington nonprofit, calculates that a mother with two children working full-time at the minimum wage would lose roughly $2,000 per year once the change went fully into effect.