I can see it if individual states opted into a dedicated income redistribution tax, where the federal government would pool money from any states opting in and redistribute it back to people using the tax mechanisms they already have in place.
Taxing needs to be explicitly mentioned in the constitution, and income taxes even needed their own amendment. It just seems like the EITC isn't actually a tax, and that the best they could do is offer an optional program that individual states could opt-in to.
The state, county, or city could pass an EITC program, of course.
https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/earned-income-tax-credit-do...
EDIT: Am I wrong? I took a taxation class, that's what I learned.
Nope, you're not wrong, I am. Sorry! It's definitely the case that in marginal cases it does go negative (it's hard to actually tell but it looks like the correct narrow income bracket AND a spouse and some kids, e.g. "normal" families++). Eyeballing it, it doesn't look like it could go more than a couple thousand $ negative in the most optimal circumstances, but not exactly sure.
I was familiar with the fact that EITC doesn't provide a credit if you don't have an income and narrows to zero with less income (and I've checked it out at both ends of the spectrum in a couple weird years), but not so much with its politics, which are surpluses for low-income-but-not-no-income families.
++ or at least how politicians like to pretend normal families look.
If the vast majority of people in Oklahoma could and did vote, I'd be more inclined to agree.
Oklahoma allows registered voters to vote early, between 8 AM and 6 PM the Thursday and Friday prior to an election. For state and federal elections you can also vote between 9 AM and 2 PM the Saturday before. This is in addition to the regular poll times of 7 AM to 7 PM, and the ability to get an absentee ballot based on being unable to vote at the available times. So in Oklahoma at least, "I work too much" is not a valid excuse to not vote, although it may be so in states without early voting and without absentee provisions.
And "a feeling of disenfranchisement" is a pretty ignorant reason on its face.
Those who can afford only public school are at immediate disadvantage at college or the workplace because of dire undereducation, and it makes itself felt in the bank account.
There is no short-term or medium-term fix in the works. Fixing education takes decades. My suggestion is to pray for another dust bowl.
Is there any evidence that better education causes increased earnings? I've seen a lot of articles arguing that it doesn't. Particularly this recent SSC post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-than...
Also: we seem to be rolling back the Enlightenment: Enlightenment: "man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity"
In absolute numbers, Western countries are richer than they ever were and their corporations pay more dividends than ever. Tax cuts for these established companies do nothing to help startups and economic innovation. It's the other way around: a welfare state can be a safety net that makes individuals more free to innovate in a free market because the risk of devastating failure is eliminated.
Hopefully, in just a few weeks time, we can redress the balance.
Quite the opposite really, the UK (and more specifically england) is leading the neoliberal charge in Europe. If anything, brexit would increase its velocity not change its direction.
Cutting the budget of a social program is not necessarily morally wrong or evil. Especially when the state has a serious deficit and things need to be cut. Budget cuts and tax increases will always be extremely unpopular, but sometimes they may be necessary.
Of course it is -- it's the NY Times. The author(s) didn't even have the guts to put their own names to it.
One example: they criticize the OK Legislature for a modest cut to oil and gas taxes.
OK's extraction tax for oil and gas is 7%. So, this year's budget takes somewhat less than during the boom.
In CA (a blue state), there is no oil or gas extraction tax at all. Zero.
So, OK producers are paying a little lower tax to the state this year, and that's evil. CA producers pay nothing, and the partisan media (and party insiders) totally ignore that.
Has the NYT (or any other mass media entity) ever brought that up? No; it would point out their hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club has protests in downtown San Francisco protesting oil development in the Dakotas while ignoring the lack of taxation, and groundwater poisoning, right here in CA.
If I would fault the legislature for anything, it's that they never take the surpluses during energy boom years and bank them for a rainy day. Energy is cyclical; we're currently in a downturn, and in a couple or five years it'll be booming again, almost guaranteed. In the good times, you have to save some of the seed corn and not eat it.
Governor Bellmon in 1987-1991 instituted higher education budgets, term limits, and other reforms, and tried to persuade the Legislature to save surpluses rather than spend them, to little avail. This is democracy. The people want their pork barrel projects in their towns and counties, and damn the budget. I believe the current governor has also made an effort to take a long term stance on budgets but she does have to deal with the legislature.
Just a personal nitpick, as someone who grew up there and still has family there: the fellow who wrote the NY Times article clearly doesn't know a whole heck of a lot about Oklahoma but merely cherry-picked this one budget item to paint Oklahomans in general as being unsupportive of education. Well, to some extent it's true and the US News rankings put OK at #30 by certain criteria this past year, not great though not the worst either. But I can testify that Oklahomans do take a lot of pride in their schools (even if sometimes it only seems to manifest itself in support for the football teams). When people put down Oklahoma, the image that always comes back to me is the monster tornado that ripped the roof off that school in Moore in 2013, and some of the teachers literally threw themselves on top of their students to protect them with their bodies. Sure, I'd give these folks a raise; I hope they got one after that storm.
Of course it's very hard to say from first principles what the tax system should be, but any attempt to do so is going to be worthwhile. The alternative is the implicit position that every single change to the tax system should make it more progressive, (and not make any single person below a certain income worse off).
