I was never a fan of the Republican Party but it didn’t used to be like this. It has always been a party primarily concerned with rich people, but they did not used to be cruel. And they used to have some shame.
The 900,000 poorest working families in North Carolina just got another tax hike from the conservatives who swept state legislature elections in 2010.
The change took effect at the beginning of 2014, meaning that the taxes those families file this spring will be the last to feature the state’s tax break for the working poor. The provision, known as the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC, will also be 10 percent less generous in its final year. State-level EITCs work by tacking on an additional benefit to the federal EITC, and the law repealing North Carolina’s EITC for 2014 also cut the credit from 5 percent to 4.5 percent of the federal benefit.
In order to qualify for the federal or state-level tax credit, tax filers must earn less than about $50,000. The goal of the credit is to buoy the incomes of working people whose employers pay them too little to provide the economic stability that having a job is supposed to ensure.
So, they take away money from nearly a million working North Carolinians and then what do they do with the money savings?
Along with the disappearance of the EITC, low-income North Carolinians will be paying higher taxes in order to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the state. Republicans moved from a two-tiered, progressive income tax system to a flat tax rate of 5.8 percent. A person who earns a million dollars per year will get a roughly $10,000 tax cut thanks to that move, but the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution will see their taxes rise. That means that four out of five taxpayers in the state were going to pay more next year even before the EITC repeal.
They’re not satisfied with screwing over working folks, though. Check this out:
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) dismissed concerns that a district with a majority of non-white voters may go unrepresented for an entire year, suggesting that delaying the special election until November would not hurt citizens because Congress gets nothing done in the fall anyway. Though Rep. Mel Watt (D) resigned his seat on the first day of the legislative year to become director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Governor Pat McCrory (R) announced last Monday that his replacement will not be elected until November 4.
Mel Watt served in the most ridiculously gerrymandered district in the country. And now the North Carolina Republicans are simply going to deny the Democrats a seat in Congress for the rest of the year.
I’d like to know how this is different from Jim Crow. The district is about 50% black, but they can’t vote for a new representative until November.
Jesse Helms would be proud.
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Where are the North Carolina Democrats on this?
There’s a backlash waiting to happen but no one is stepping up to the plate (outside of Moral Monday) yet.
Yes, it is precise Jim Crow just as much as the theft of Detroit is Jim Crow.
Where is the Democratic outrage about Detroit where the state is effectively stealing the pensions of city workers to pay of the same bankers who tanked the national economy?
Where is the Democratic outrage about Detroit where the state is effectively stealing the pensions of city workers to pay of the same bankers who tanked the national economy?
The outrage, from people besides Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would be phony as all hell. Remember that the Michigan Democratic Party wouldn’t get behind the attempt to recall Snyder. Party voters, I don’t think, realize what party “elites” are up to. Most of them don’t have the voters interests in mind. Look at your own Senator. Running away from Obama is going to get her re-elected? Hahahaha!!
Agreed, TarheelDem, from a fellow NC dem. However, I am retaining a bit of optimism because of the power of Moral Monday and, ironically, because the behavior of McCrory and Co. continues to be so over the top. The combination has the potential to generate a really, really large off-year turnout.
Reading the Raleigh News & Observer is to be confronted with new Republican outrages virtually every day or two. They make NJ Republicans look like lazy amateurs in their obsession to punish the “enemy”. They are destroying everything good about the state as if they were in an Olympic competition with Michigan and Wisconsin, and they’re winning. There is a lot of anger building here in the African American, Latino and transplanted Northerner communities. The Moral Monday events come spring are going to be something to behold.
There are some rural and small-town whites thinking that voting for Republicans in order to get a two-party system was a mistake. Just got alternating one-party systems. I’m curious to see if there is any backlash to the pure anti-Christian cruelty of these arrogant Republicans from the real churchgoers (not the politicized congregations).
How is this new? Ask a voter who lives in the District of Columbia.
Whaddya gonna do about it? Keep returning these Republican hucksters to the legislature, or try something else? It’s as plain as it can be that your Republican state legislative officials’ first and last loyalty is to the wealthy folks who bankroll their campaigns. And you don’t belong to that elite group.
So, is your fear and hatred of certain people so pervasive that you’ll pay more taxes so that rich people can pay less? See the way the voters of Mel Watt’s district are being treated? That’s you, too. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough. And your overlords won’t care one bit about your squawking, because you’re so quiet and docile right now. They know you don’t have any bite behind your bark.
Right?
Neither the post here nor the linked post at Think Progress take the time to tell us how much money is at stake for poorer taxpayers.
The maximum EITC in 2014 for a family with two kids is $5460. The North Carolina state add-on has been 5 percent of that amount, or a maximum of $273. The 2014 reduction from 5 percent to 4.5 percent would cost a family $27, or just a little more than 50 cents a week.
The complete elimination of the additional EITC stings quite a bit more–the entire $273 will be lost, or about $5 a week.
I can buy that this is bad policy, but equating it with Jim Crow? C’mon.
And then there’s the increase in sales taxes that never really gets talked about.
The Jim Crow part isn’t taxes, it’s taking away this heavily gerrymandered district’s representation.
To paraphrase the Made Man Wildstein: They are the children of Democratic voters.
OT:
Administration Is Seen as Retreating on Environment in Talks on Pacific Trade
Time to kill these deals before too much compromise leaves us breathless.
Is there anything that we can trust the guys on? Anything at all?
Short answer, “No.” Long answer, “Hell no.” Not expecting a majority of rank-and-file Democrats to wake up to this fact anytime soon.
This is Obama’s puppy. Remember Penny Pritzker?
And won’t dissecting that be a gift this summer. Shoot me now.
“Retreat” is a nice little euphemism; or is it Newspeak?
For close to a hundred years, the Republican Party has always been like this. Took them a while to rid themselves of their progressives and attract the Democratic regressives. Once the Democratic Party exiled its progressives, the barriers to being who they’ve always been disappeared.
In good news, Georgia has cranked up its own Moral Monday and South Carolina had its first Truthful Tuesday.
great info
Kaos Anak