House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R-MI)
Way to go, House Ways and Means Republicans. You just
show us what your priorities are:
Republicans on a congressional tax-writing committee objected Tuesday to the cost of a bill that would spend $1 million a year to help keep foster kids out of the sex trade, and then voted for $310 billion in tax breaks for businesses.
Many Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee backed the foster kids measure, but they removed a key provision that would have added $12 million to its 10-year cost and that was not paid for with budget cuts elsewhere.
The GOP lawmakers made no such objections to the $310 billion over 10 years that it would cost to make permanent six expired tax cuts that primarily benefit large corporations, including the so-called GE loophole. Lacking "pay-fors," the cost of those cuts would be added to the deficit.
Without commenting on the efficacy of this particular measure (given that a lot of measures to "combat sex trafficking" are counterproductive and hurt the people they purport to help), what we've got here is Republicans saying "we do not want foster kids trafficked, but neither do we want to pay a whopping $1 million a year to address it" while also saying "more than $30 billion a year in corporate tax giveaways? Absolutely!" And foster kids
weren't the only group House Republicans ignored in favor of tax loopholes for GE and Apple. They also didn't do anything about:
... the key improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) that are due to expire at the end of 2017. If Congress lets them expire, a mother with two children who works full time at the minimum wage would lose $1,725 a year in her CTC beginning in 2018. Marriage penalties would be higher for many working married couples, and many working families with three or more children would lose part of their EITC. In all, about 26 million children in 13 million low- and moderate-income working families would be worse off.
But clearly it's companies with hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in annual revenue that urgently need tax breaks now and forever.