A flat refundable credit for black taxpayers would bypass EITC complexity and audit risk.

Evidence

My first choice for race-based reform would be a refundable tax credit—like the earned income tax credit discussed in chapter 1 but simplified. Under this plan, Congress would assign a single fixed credit to all black taxpayers. If your tax liability is lower than the credit, you’ll receive the difference, in the form of a refund, every year. (If your tax liability is higher, you’ll still pay the difference, but you’ll pay less than white taxpayers with the same household income, which would satisfy a definition of horizontal equity that took societal racism into account.) The fixed credit makes this a more effective plan than the EITC—which, as we’ve seen, varies credits based on income and children in the household for added complexity, leading to increased taxpayer audits and high error rates. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 544

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the proposed ‘flat refundable credit’ reform and spells out what horizontal equity adjusted for societal racism would mean.
• XREF: connects to: Reparations must reform the tax code’s antiblack bias through credits and surtaxes — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 558
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Reparations must reform the tax code’s antiblack bias through credits and surtaxes — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 558