US bishops: Continue child tax credit, unemployment relief

December 09, 2010

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is urging Congress to maintain the earned income tax credit and child tax credit and continue relief to the unemployed.

“The Catholic bishops have been strong supporters of the refundability and expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, particularly because of their effectiveness in helping families escape or prevent poverty and offer essential resources for raising children,” said Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development.”Low- and middle-income working families would see their economic security severely threatened if the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit are not maintained in their current forms.”

“A low-income family with two children, with one income at the minimum wage ($15,000 a year), stands to lose roughly $1,400 if the 2009 Child Tax Credit reform is eliminated,” he continued. “In such an economic climate, a promise to raise taxes on no one must include low-income families.”

Urging Congress to maintain relief for unemployed workers, Bishop Blaire quoted from Venerable John Paul II’s 1981 encyclicalLaborem Exercens: “The obligation to provide unemployment benefits, that is to say, the duty to make suitable grants indispensable for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families, is a duty springing from the fundamental principle of the moral order in this sphere, namely the principle of the common use of goods or, to put it in another and still simpler way, the right to life and subsistence.”

 

---

For all current news, visit our News home page.

---

 
Further information:

• Archbishop Dolan, Bishop Blaire Urge Congress to Support Tax Credits for Low-Income Families, Relief for Unemployed (USCCB)
• Ven. John Paul II: Encyclical on human work (Laborem Exercens, 1981)