Work hours and vacation around the world

[GrayMouser]

Originally posted by jerseydevil
How is that even going to work when democrats are trying to twist the tax code by arguing that people who do NOT pay taxes are being unfairly treated because they're not getting a tax CREDIT. They already feel that people who don't pay any tax should be getting money back.

The law enacting the federal Earned Income Tax Credit has been praised by former President Ronald Reagan as "the best antipoverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress."

I assume this is the program you're referring to?

For example, in a 1996 Wall Street Journal column, conservative Harvard economist and Journal contributing editor Robert J. Barro observed: "...There exists a serious program in the form of the earned income tax credit that actually helps the working poor in a way that promotes work and discourages welfare. The EITC was originally a Republican idea — started by the Ford administration in 1975 and expanded by the Reagan administration during the glorious 1980s and the Bush administration in 1990....Mr. Clinton's support is not sufficient reason to regard the program as mistaken. In fact, it has a well conceived structure that ought to be retained and perhaps expanded in a comprehensive welfare reform package."(1)

Similarly, in a 1996 Business Week article, the well-known conservative economist and Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker praised the EITC for aiding poor families without reducing employment, discouraging work, or increasing reliance on public assistance. Becker wrote that the EITC "rewards rather than penalizes poor families with working members....Empirical studies confirm the prediction of economic theory that the EITC increases the labor force participation and employment of people with low wages because they need to work in order to receive this credit." Becker also applauded the EITC for being "fully available to families with both parents present, even where only one works and the other cares for their children...."(2) [i.e., for being available to low-income working families with stay-at-home mothers].

A series of studies have been conducted in the past few years on the EITC's effects on work behavior. These studies have consistently found that the EITC has substantial positive effects in inducing single parents to go to work. One of the most important of these studies finds that the proportion of single mothers who are in the labor force rose sharply between 1984 and 1996 and that the EITC expansions instituted during this period are responsible for more than half of this increase.
Another study finds that the EITC offsets between one-fourth and one-third of the decline during the past 20 years in the share of national income received by the poorest fifth of households with children.
Recent Census data show that among working families, the EITC lifts substantially more children out of poverty than any other government program or category of programs. The EITC is particularly important in reducing poverty among children in the South, where working families tend to have lower wages and consequently are more likely to qualify for the EITC. In addition, a just-released study by Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty found that the EITC reduces poverty among young children by nearly one fourth.

http://www.cbpp.org/311eitc.htm

I can see why you'd hate that... and of course one of the first things the new Republican majority did was to pass a law that said that U.S. companies that shift their corporate headquarters to tax havens and money-laundering paradises like Bermuda to avoid American taxes are still eligible for Government contracts.

"Hey, you working fools pay for those other fools to die in Iraq..we'll just lie here on the beach and suck up the juice...thank you, Republicans"