2014/03/04/Obama to Republicans

title/short::Obama to Republicans But both these factors also demonstrate why the GOP’s interest in the EITC is so fragile. The EITC plays the role here of a protective shield against populist attacks. Republicans may at some level believe their own defenses of the program, which appear at those moments when it is needed to assail the minimum wage and then predictably disappear. What’s more, actually enacting such a plan would destroy its value as a Republican campaign proposal. A proper Republican anti-poverty proposal can’t be something that Obama has endorsed, let alone something he’s already signed into law.
 * when: when posted::2014/03/04
 * author: author::Jonathan Chait
 * source: site::New York Magazine
 * topics: topic::Barack Obama topic::US Republican Party topic::Earned Income Tax Credit topic::minimum wage
 * keywords
 * link: URL::http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/obama-to-gop-youre-right-lets-expand-eitc.html
 * title: title::Obama to Republicans: You're Right, Let's Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
 * summary: Republicans, eager to shake off their royalist image, have insisted that they share the goal of raising wages for low-income workers, but merely object to the chosen method. The much better way to go about it, they insisted, was to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, a wage subsidy for low-income workers. So now Obama is saying, okay, let’s do that, then. The administration’s budget proposes a major new expansion of the credit.

The ultimate trouble is that the EITC costs money. And when you get into the gritty reality, Republicans are not willing to devote resources to it. Republicans would never agree to expand the EITC by simply adding the cost to the budget deficit. (Rubio, when asked about his proposal to more generously wages for childless workers, replied that his plan would not add to the total cost of the EITC, which means it would come out of the hides of poor workers.) Obama proposes in his budget to offset the cost by closing tax deductions for the rich, but obviously Republicans would never agree to that either.