[PEN-L:11454] Re: Child tax credit

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

Max notes:
"(Sigh.)  There was already a wedge between those classified
as working or nonworking.  Putting this on the EITC and its
boosters verges on the 'social fascism' rap.  The EITC was a resort
to get some money to some poor folks."

Max, the EITC is a way to get the govt to subsidize part of the costs of
reproducing the most oppressed sectors of the working class, bring them
above poverty levels, which underestimates the actual reproduction costs of
labor anyway.

 The EITC was not meant to counteract the maldistribution of income. It is
a subsidy at the expense ultimately of better paid sections of the working
class to capital (Shaikh and Tonak have found that the working class as a
whole pays out more in taxes than it receives in benefits and
compensation); such tax policy is bound to exacerbate divisions and
resentments within the working class and thus lay the ground for fascist
politics, organized against the symbol of a poor immigrant and black
underclass.

 So here I would emphasize not so much the division between the deserving
and un-deserving poor, as Doug has; rather the EITC seems to put a wedge
between better and worse paid sections of the working class. This is why
Gingrich is beginning a campaign to attract those better parts of the
working class by highlighting the abuses of EITC (though the real problem
is not undeserving recepients but the failure of actually qualified people
to really receive it--Maggie once noted a study which found that almost 1/2
of those who do qualify do not collect?). The abusers are implicitly
symbolized as a black and brown lower working class.  See Dan Carter's From
George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, which I have been browsing in the
bookstore

Rakesh
Ethnic Studies