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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