                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, November 24, 1995                   TAG: 9511240030
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TAX CREDIT

CONGRESSMAN Rick Boucher of Abingdon estimates that 95,000 families in his Southwest Virginia district qualify for the earned-income tax credit, a federal program once described by President Ronald Reagan as ``the best anti-poverty, best pro-family, best job-creation measure to come out of Congress.''

There's no guessing how many of those Southwest Virginia families might be childless couples, with each spouse possibly holding down a job or two in an effort to get ahead, maybe buy a home, aiming toward the day when they might bring children into the world with as much financial security as they can muster.

These families are by no means shiftless folks, looking to the government to take care of them. Yet they would no longer be eligible for even a modest tax credit under the Republican plan to ``reform'' the EITC.

Granted, the tax credit was designed to benefit mostly working-poor families with children - an effort to help keep them from falling deep into poverty and having to go on welfare.

Criticized for the absurdity of scrapping this incentive to work while trying to induce welfare recipients into entering the job market, Republican lawmakers have tentatively agreed to a somewhat kinder, gentler approach. They claim to have reworked formulas to ensure that families with children will gain as much from a proposed $500-per-child tax credit as they will lose under big cutbacks in the EITC.

If this is truly accomplished, it would be a considerable improvement over previous plans to give no help to working-poor families with children. There's nothing smart or compassionate, however, about cutting off the childless working poor.

In a recent letter to this newspaper, Texas Republican Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked why middle-income taxpayers should help some 4 million able-bodied workers who have no children to support. Fair question. Here's another: Why should middle-income taxpayers help finance the $245 billion in tax cuts Republicans want to give mostly to businesses and the well-off?

Whatever face they put on it, the scheduled emasculation of the EITC still carries a bizarre message: Hard work by those struggling to make it on their own out of poverty will not be rewarded.

by CNB