NRO: The Mike Lee/Marco Rubio Tax Plan Jacks Taxes Up In Order to Bribe Families With Large Child Tax Credits

The child tax credit may be nice, but it's expensive, and Rubio and Lee have a not-very-Republican way of paying for it: jacking up income tax rates.

The top rate, they would lower, but only down to 35% from the current 40%. But that's not the worrisome part. The worrisome part is at the very low level of income at which people may be forced to start paying this tippy-top marginal tax rate, based on Lee's prior proposed tax schemes:

The Rubio-Lee mystery isn’t easy to solve because the full tax plan isn’t available yet. And the mystery only deepens when you scrutinize the numbers in a previous version of the plan, the one Senator Lee put forward as legislation in 2014 ("The Family Fairness and Opportunity Tax Reform Act"). That plan would have the troublingly high rate of 35 percent kick in at $87,850 in taxable income for singles and $175,700 for married couples. Currently the 35 percent threshold is crossed only when a couple has taxable income of $405,100. In other words, Lee and Rubio may be thinking of putting a successful single nurse in the top income-tax bracket.

They would also cap the mortgage-deduction to mortgages of $300,000 or less.

This debate gets at a serious schism in the party. Many thoughtful Republicans say that the GOP has nothing to offer downscale voters, economically, and often call for increased child tax credits as a bit of a GOP subsidy to such people.

The trouble is, as this NRO notes, you can never outbid the Democrats when it comes to showering Other People's Money on voters.

And furthermore, while it's certainly part of the conservative agenda to be "family friendly," it's also a major part of the conservative agenda that we do not redistribute money. And make no mistake, this is a redistribution-of-wealth tax plan, though money will be redistributed evenly between Obama voters and non-Obama voters, unlike the typical Obama redistribution scheme consisting of redistributing money only to his constituents.

I dunno. This is a major philosophical debate here. I think I'm against large cash gifts from the government to the citizens, even if the citizens in question represent what are ideologically taken to be worthy recipients of such largesse.

posted by Ace at 04:11 PM

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