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Okay, let's make something perfectly clear: welfare is not a tax cut.

Democrats have been crying that people who pay no Federal income taxes, or who get at least everything they pay back as a refund do not get an extra benefit from a tax cut.

Well, gosh...and people who buy a Ford do not get a rebate offered by General Motors! It was long ago established that Democrats contact an alternate reality when they need to perform math, and apparently the same goes for logic. Of course people who do not pay taxes, or who are not due a refund do not get to "benefit" from legislation that increases deductions! Once you get to zero taxes, the game is over, and the taxpayer has won!

Reality has not stopped the Democrats from whining, though. They insist that people who pay no taxes, or even get more back than they pay in should get an additional benefit from a tax cut. Sorry, that is a mathematic and logical impossibility. If you want them to get more money via the government, it is called welfare, not a tax cut.

There are times and places when welfare is appropriate, even on a national scale. However, it does no good to try to portray welfare as a tax cut. The only reason to attempt to do so is for propaganda purposes. The Democrats are well versed in propaganda when it comes to tax cuts. They have tried to portray them as "only for the rich", as "racist" and as "rewards to campaign contributors". Thankfully for society, the vast majority of Americans see through such doublespeak.

It all comes back to the raison d'être of the Democrat Party: to make as many people as dependent upon government as possible. Once people get addicted to government welfare, it is very tough to break free. When the Republicans finally reformed welfare in 1996 Democrats predicted the end of the world was upon us. Instead, people finally had the impetus to crawl out of the welfare morass and hundreds of thousands of them found jobs and became productive, tax paying Americans. Democrats want desperately to reverse that trend. They realize that welfare was rightly criticized as more of a hammock than safety net, so now they wish to change the term to "tax cut", which most Americans view favorably.

If the Democrats succeed in their propaganda ploy, we will soon be discussing every Federal program that increases payments to individuals as a "tax cut". That is of course what the Democrats wish would happen. Once they have changed the meaning of tax cuts, they can play the same class warfare games with taxes that they did before President Reagan changed the public perception of taxes, tax cuts and who pays the taxes.

The points in favor of giving low-income Americans additional welfare at this point are valid, but we do not need to play the propaganda game of the Democrats to enable it. Any aid to people who pay no net Federal income taxes should be called welfare, and it should be temporary, lest millions of Americans fall into the poverty trap caused by the so-called Great Society programs of the 1960s.

There is another danger that may arise from increasing welfare payments to people who currently pay no net taxes. If you increase the number of such people, they could start demanding more and more taxpayer money be funneled to them, and once they reach critical mass they could exert enough influence on the political process to enable the necessary changes in tax laws. The result would be an economic catastrophe. Net taxpayers would find their burden increased again and again while those who pay no taxes would increase their wealth and unearned income. Once non-taxpayers reached a wealth and total income level close to that of the taxpayer, people would stop working. This is exactly what happened with the welfare programs of the Great Society era. Payments to individuals were close enough to those earned through work that there was little incentive to work, and payments went on for so long that people lost all desire to work.

The vast majority of Americans must be productive members of society for our economic and taxation systems to function. If those systems collapsed today, it would make the Great Depression look like a temporary downturn. We must not let that happen. As the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. We should not let the good intention of helping low-income Americans start us down the path of national dependence.

...welfare is not a tax cut.

Once you get to zero taxes, the game is over, and the taxpayer has won!

...it does no good to try and portray welfare as a tax cut.

Any aid to people who pay no net Federal income taxes should be called welfare....