Democrats; give tax rebates to non-taxpayers

Associated Press writes (in the Miami Herald) that economists and Democrats advocate giving tax rebate to people who don’t pay taxes;

The poor are the people most likely to spend a tax rebate, if they are handed one in an economic revival plan. Whether that happens depends on who prevails – the White House or the Democrats who run Congress.

Democrats want to make sure rebates get to more of the poor, including those who have jobs but earn too little to pay income taxes.

The idea is the more that people spend, the more it will energize an economy threatening to slide into a recession for the first time since 2001. According to many economists, the lower that people are on the income ladder, the more probable it is that they will spend a rebate and spend it quickly – just the shot for the ailing economy. These people are more likely to be living from one paycheck to the next, without other assets to draw on.

Then why call it a tax rebate? Call it income redistribution. A tax rebate would be letting people keep their own money – giving it to people who don’t pay taxes is taking money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn’t. We already know how poor people act when they get their hands on other people’s money – take what happened with those $10,000 debit cards the government handed out to people who lost property in New Orleans.

Giving every poor family in the country a Wii probably isn’t what George Bush or the Democrats have in mind, but that’s probably how it’ll end up.

Category: Economy, Politics, Society