After repeatedly displaying their collective impotence over the past several years in the face of vexing issues like healthcare, unemployment, and Iraq, congressional Republicans have now apparently discovered a pressing national concern that brings out their steely legislative resolve in all its tumescent glory: America's ever-worsening lucky duckies crisis.

Bid to Save Tax Refunds For the Poor Is Blocked Congressional negotiators beat back efforts yesterday to expand and preserve tax refunds for poor families, even as they added $13 billion in corporate tax breaks to a package of middle-class tax cuts that could come to a vote in the Senate today.

....The dust-up centers on an obscure provision in the 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut that Congress passed in 2001. That tax cut expanded the $500-per-child tax credit to $1,000, but it also made another child credit available as a tax refund to some poor families who pay little or no federal income taxes.

Such families were allowed to claim a child credit worth as much as 10 percent of their earnings over $10,000. But the 2001 law stipulated that the $10,000 threshold would rise with inflation, effectively slicing into or eliminating refunds for families whose income does not keep up with inflation. The threshold now stands at $10,750.

Because incomes at the bottom end of the workforce have largely stagnated, the rising threshold has had a significant impact, said Leonard E. Burman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Of the 11 million families claiming the child tax refund, more than 4 million -- with 9.2 million children -- will see their credit shrink or disappear in 2005, Burman estimated.

Compassionate conservatism, indeed, as one of my blogging betters would say. And the rest is here.

UPDATE: In case you missed it yesterday (as I somehow did), Jesse Taylor has discovered yet another fine example of compassionate conservatism at work.

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