A recent comic strip showed a man buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks for a little over 2 dollars.

“There goes one month’s tax cut,” he muses.

The reality is closer to the truth than conservatives want to admit. President George Bush has said that his tax relief package addresses the concerns of working Americans. But lowering the income tax rates as he plans is not a sound way to “unlock the door to the middle class” for the working poor.

Although the working poor, on a percentage basis, will get a “higher” income tax cut than the well-to-do, their real incomes will not necessarily increase. In reality, many Americans who live near the poverty line, including those moving off the welfare rolls, do not make enough money to pay income tax. However, their total federal tax burden is considerable, including payroll tax. When their entire tax burden in considered, those people will not benefit from Bush’s plan.

On the flip side, Bush has devoted a significant amount of money in his budget to ending the estate tax, which affects about two percent of taxpayers. Such a tax may hurt charitable donations from wealthy taxpayers to institutions. Some have argued that such a tax provides “relief” to those who need it least: people who inherit large amounts of money.

The elimination of the estate tax is a boon to the upper class and a bane to the working poor. Providing more money to the rich in such a disproportionate manner effectively takes it away from the poor.

Bush must address the needs of the low-income families with children, including a quarter of New England families (244,000 of them residing in Massachusetts) who will see no real change in income under this tax relief.

One way that has been suggested to ease the burden on such families is to increase the childcare credit. To do so would be to make it more feasible for parents to stay in the labor force.

Another measure would be to fix the “glitch” that causes people with children to pay more taxes, sometimes as much as thousands of dollars per year if they marry, due to the federal tax credit system.

The Collegian believes that such measures should be considered in an effort to keep the tax burden equitably distributed. However, our concern is that the disorganized manner in which Democrats approach the problem will be ineffective, resulting in tweaks to Bush’s plan rather than real change. We believe that Democrats should resist the repeal of the federal estate tax as an unacceptable gift to the upper class.

Democrats are divided on the details on making Bush’s plan more friendly to low-income workers. However, we hope that they will insist on a plan that makes sense for the neediest families. The plan as it stands is an insult to the economic struggles of the working poor, and it will not in any way help them to enter the ranks of the middle class.

Information from the Boston Globe was used in this article.
Unsigned editorials represent a majority opinion of the editorial board.