It is
hard enough to work every day and still remain poor. Heavier still
is the burden thrust upon the working grandmothers, aunts and
uncles who struggle to hold together extended families in the
relentlessly hostile environment of Bush’s America, by caring
for the children. Yet it is these struggling families that the
Bush men have singled out for humiliation and further impoverishment.
Confident that they have smashed the very idea of economic
justice in America, the Administration is preparing to turn the
Internal Revenue Service into a grand inquisitor of the poor.
Like a
pack of pot-bellied hyenas, the Bush men instinctively target
the weak – in this instance, the four million extended families
among the 16 million households that make use of federal Earned
Income Tax Credits (EITC). Under proposed changes in the EITC
rules, relatives raising children not directly their own, the
saviors of so many fragile families, will have to submit additional
documents in order to prove that they deserve a tax credit that
they have already earned through years of Social Security payments.
Some of these documents are impossible to obtain in the real world
of the poor. That’s why Bush’s Treasury Department is asking for
them.
The Earned
Income Tax Credit program began in 1975 as a work incentive for
low-income families. Typically providing about $2,000 to families
with children, EITC is “probably our country’s most effective
program to lift working families 
out
of poverty,” according the Maude Hurd, President of ACORN, the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. EITC helped
almost five million people escape poverty in 1999, more than half
of them children. In the twisted logic of the organized rich,
that’s reason enough to bring in the IRS.
Torture
by paperwork
The Bush
men are carrying on the tradition of harassing the poor away from
programs that might better their lives. While congressional strangulation
has crippled the IRS’s ability to audit rich individuals, whose
cheating costs the public an estimated $30 billion a year, the
Bush Treasury Department proposes to force the poor to jump through
impossible hoops to receive help in caring for their children.
ACORN
successfully lobbied against some of the wickedest rule changes,
including a requirement that caretakers prove they are related
to the children they are raising “by submitting marriage certificates
from marriages that occurred many years ago, or in other countries,
or between two people other than the person filing the forms,”
said ACORN spokesman David Swanson. There can be no purpose to
such torture by paperwork than to drive deserving families out
of the program.
It is
inconceivable that middle class constituencies would be subjected
to this kind of bureaucratic bullying. “Imagine if millions of
homeowners were required to produce this sort of documentation
before obtaining their mortgage interest deduction,” said ACORN
President Hurd. “A proposal like that would end political careers.
So should this one. It’s time to raise our voices and make sure
these burdensome new rules for families working and raising children
on modest wages are not allowed to go beyond the planning stages.”
The
Department of Catch-22s
The Treasury
Department backed off of the marriage certificate requirements,
but continues to erect barriers for participation in EITC. For
example, new procedures would require that caretakers prove to
the IRS that a child has lived with them for at least six months,
but specifically disqualifies neighbors from attesting to these
facts. Yet daycare providers who live across town are permitted
to sign affidavits vouching for the child’s residency. It is a
carefully constructed Catch-22, in which neighbors who can best
verify the actual living arrangements of children are rejected,
while day care providers who have never seen the inside of a child’s
home are asked to attest to his place of residence. Many childcare
providers have announced that they will refuse to swear to such
unknowable facts.
The Bush
men conspire to weaken both the extended families of the poor
and the neighborhood ties that support these families. Many working
people prefer that neighbors care for their children during the
work shift. However, under the proposed rules neighbors who also
care for children cannot sign affidavits
attesting
to the child’s residency unless they are licensed providers. (Ministers
are exceptions!) As ACORN points out, “studies indicate that 75
percent to 80 percent of family day care providers in the nation
are not licensed.” Thus, those neighbors who are most familiar
with the child’s circumstances – practical partners with the family
in caring for the child – would be forbidden to sign the documents
necessary to qualify for EITC.
Unable
to destroy the highly successful EITC program legislatively, the
Bush administration attempts to gut it through rules changes,
just as they are preparing to “reform” Head Start to death. Indeed,
the Bush men wage war on the poor on so many fronts, even 160,000-family
strong ACORN finds its defensive ranks stretched thin. Spokesman
David Swanson puts it this way:
“First,
the extremely rich are given huge tax cuts, leading to cuts in
schools, health care, and other useful programs, and leaving states
and cities in the position of having to make cuts or raise taxes.
Then, low-income taxpayers are quietly cut out of the child tax
credit at the last minute. Apparently only children of wealthier
parents need support. Finally, the IRS is proposing the
most cynical possible maneuver to limit the number of families
who obtain the Earned Income Tax Credit, setting up a guilty-until-proven-innocent
system that would fly exactly as well as a brick if proposed for
wealthy tax payers or even corporations.”
To the
Bush men, all’s fair in pursuit of class war. They make up the
rules on the way to the bank, laughing at the uses they have found
for the IRS, anticipating a world in which the rich are immune
from taxation and only the poor are audited.
