It remains to be seen whether rank-and-file lawmakers will go along with it, but GOP House leaders backed off their demands and agreed to extend the payroll tax cut through the rest of the year. They paid a high political price for their last showdown over the issue, and they likely thought it wasn’t wise during an election year to get blamed for raising taxes on 160 million workers.
The poorest U.S. households no longer receive the majority of government benefits, the New York Times reported. The share of benefits going to the bottom fifth of households declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007. But as benefits to the middle class have expanded, federal tax money to pay for the benefits has not. According to the Times analysis: “In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue.… A decade later, after one Medicare expansion, two recessions and three rounds of tax cuts, spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.”
The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services contends that the food-stamp eligibility change it made – which has resulted in more than 1,000 U.S. children being dropped from the federally funded program – was its only option to change what it considered to be an unfair system. But a leader of El Centro, an anti-poverty program in Kansas City, Kan., said the group contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if capping benefits would be a possible alternative, the Kansas Health Institute News Service reported. According to El Centro, USDA indicated that it would be open to considering such an alternative if Kansas submitted a request for a waiver, which takes six to eight weeks to review. If so, why didn’t SRS attempt that first before kicking U.S. kids off food stamps?
