Is One Party the Problem, or the Whole Establishment?

The uniparty is trying to force an expansion of welfare, including for corporations

When Democrats rammed through Congress the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, they were rightly criticized because the law caused consumer prices to go up, not down.

If you think Republicans are any better, think again.

“Conservatives” in the House GOP, led by Jason Smith, quickly passed a bill with a wordier but equally deceitful title: the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024.

As if it came right from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, 91.5% of the money claimed as tax relief for American families and workers will instead go to expanding welfare, primary for those who are barely working, if at all, while disincentivizing the formation of stable families.

That’s what we call “conservative values.”

The bill expands the Additional Child Tax Credit welfare program by about a third, aimed at people who pay no income taxes, and provides no relief for the typical American household with about $70,000 of annual income.

So much for helping the working class.

Instead, this is an expansion of welfare and works like a negative income tax rate, where the government pays you instead of you paying the government. Even worse, the subsidy increase will largely go to non-married parents, disincentivizing the rearing of children in a stable family with two married parents.

Again, “conservative values” anyone?

But it gets worse. The bill would extend new welfare subsidies to illegal aliens. People who cannot work in the United States and are here illegally would get hundreds of millions of dollars from the government—at taxpayer expense, of course.

And you thought Texans were mad now!

Even for American citizens and those here legally, the bill will result in more people on welfare and not working. While proponents of the legislation tout it for increasing work requirements, it does exactly the opposite.

House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith deserves particular scorn here because he has repeatedly lied to the media (and thus the American people) on this point.

If the bill becomes law, people will no longer need to consistently hold down a job to receive these payments. Instead, they could be unemployed for a year and simply work every other year, while still receiving more welfare.

Smith is helping undo the actual, genuine welfare reforms that Bill Clinton signed in the 90’s. Remind us who is the party of welfare expansion again? Oh, that’s right: the uniparty.

The perverse incentives here are almost endless, like the fact that roughly 40 percent of these enhanced benefits wouldn’t even go to custodial parents but to other people who do not even support the child in question and with whom the child in does not even live.

Then there’s the issue of fraud, which looms large in any discussion of these kinds of programs. For example, the improper payment rate of the Earned Income Tax Credit is 32 percent, or just under a third.

The Additional Child Tax Credit has an improper payment rate of about 16 percent, but that would increase with larger payments because there’s more incentive to try and cheat the system.

We had no idea “conservative values” were… oh, never mind.

While it may sound well-intentioned to have a robust social safety net, what programs like this have done is trap people into a cycle of poverty by disincentivizing work. Earning even a relatively small income will reduce benefits by much more than the gains from that income, so your incentive is to stay on welfare.

But this expansion of welfare isn’t just for individuals—corporations are in on the action too.

In brief, the bill provides increased flexibility for when businesses can deduct expenses like research and development, which will purportedly increase investment.

But most of the value of this change is being made retroactively, meaning it will include previous tax years that have come and gone. Businesses cannot change past decisions, so this will do nothing to alter economic decisions that have already been made.

Instead, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this will cost tax revenue and have no positive impact on economic growth.

And that’s just one way in which this legislation would increase the deficit. Overall, it leaves a $117 billion fiscal gap in 2024 alone, when the deficit is already expected to exceed $2 trillion, as our readers already know.

Ironically, this would fan the flames of inflation, which is fundamentally a tax. Yet again, this bill does the opposite of its name, failing to provide tax relief, and technically doing just the opposite.

We’re not saying Smith is as evil as Goebbels, but he’s certainly as good at lying.

Democrats don’t have a monopoly on counterproductive legislation, as some Republicans in Congress are demonstrating today. Likewise, Republicans, and not just Democrats, can give deceptive names to the bills crafted by their staff.

It’s a mistake to think that one political party is always right and the other wrong - the political establishment, or uniparty, is the real enemy of the people.

Elected officials need to put politics aside for a moment and assess legislation based on its merits, not its authors or slick-sounding name. The legislation’s gratuitously panegyric nomenclature is a façade of tax relief that merely sticks America’s middle class with another bill.

Taxpayers deserve better. Investers deserve better. American citizens deserve better.

That’s just our three cents (adjusted for inflation).