It?s a Catch-22 that only Washington could conceive of ? a small classic in this city?s divide-and-conquer politics.
As talks resume in Congress on paying for the payroll tax holiday, Republicans are proposing to find billions in savings by denying child tax credit refunds to working-class immigrant parents who lack a Social Security number proving they are authorized to work in the U.S.
Continue ReadingThe impact on Latino communities is far more severe than first advertised when the House approved the plan last month ? and at first glance, the optics seem brutal for the GOP going into the 2012 elections, at a time when the Hispanic vote is growing.
Already, the air is filled with charges of Wall Street elitism and income inequality in the nation. And GOP front-runner Mitt Romney?s wealth, Harvard pedigree and record as a venture capitalist have opened up a class divide in the GOP itself even as he has gone hard right of conservative rivals like Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the question of immigration.
?Why Latinos? What does it mean the symbolism of targeting poor Hispanics? What message does that send?? Eric Rodriguez, a vice president for research and legislation at the National Council of La Raza, told POLITICO. ?This is a good piece of conversation we?re going to have with our community.?
But leading the charge for the GOP is no less than Texas Rep. Sam Johnson, an emotional icon for House Republicans because of his seven years as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. And armed with a Treasury report from this summer, the 81-year-old Air Force veteran has exposed a real Achilles heel for Democrats in using the tax code as an anti-poverty program.
Indeed, the past decade has seen a genuine explosion in the cost of refunds paid out by the government under the child tax credit, first created in the post-welfare reform period of the late 1990s. The annual cost was less than $1 billion a year prior to 2001, when President George W. Bush greatly expanded the credit. And in 2009, President Barack Obama went a big step further by making it easier for lower-income families ? with little or no federal income tax liability ? to still claim the refunds.
Treasury data show that 21 million tax filers in 2011 claimed the refundable credits, which averaged about $676 per child and totaled $26.1 billion. That?s more than some Cabinet departments spend annually, and represents a five-fold increase since 2002, when the cost was closer to $5 billion.
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