This 2% SS tax cut was passed because you can’t give a income tax cut to those that don’t pay income tax anyway.
Rich Lowry wrote about this five years ago.
Rebates for Non-Taxpayers?
By Rich Lowry
January 25, 2008 12:00 A.M.
Should non-taxpayers get a tax rebate? That had been the revealing sticking point in the Washington debate over an economic stimulus package.
Democrats insisted on spreading the rebate to people who don’t pay the federal income tax for a simple reason — there are so many of them. A literal rebate in the sense of giving back a bit of what people pay in federal income taxes was objectionable because it would exclude the 40 percent of households that pay none at all.
That fact is worth noting because it puts the lie to the notion that the federal tax code is a vampirish scheme by Republican economic elites to privilege the rich at the expense of the poor. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards can barely say the word “taxes” without retailing some version of this tale, which is detached from reality and has been getting steadily more so.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/223492