Given her liberal record, it’s no surprise that Vice President Kamala Harris’s recently released economic agenda calls for vast increases in benefits for low-income adults. But it should be surprising for that spending to be cast as tax relief since low-income adults pay few, if any, federal income taxes in the first place.
That’s the spin Harris wants you to believe, and the media have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. CNN was typical in headlining that Harris’s economic plan includes “lower-income tax relief.” But this characterization overstates any tax relief while providing rhetorical cover for Harris’s real goal: vastly expanding the welfare state and radically redistributing income.
The policies in question are called refundable tax credits, which originated in the 1970s and have grown in number and scope ever since. The name suggests recipients are merely…
