AMY GOODMAN: And finally today, on Wednesday, President Bush signed into law the third tax cut in three years. Bush signed the bill in the East Room of the White House among gilded mirrors and chandeliers and in front of dozens of cameras and hundreds of lobbyists, aides and taxpayers. He claimed the measure will create jobs and give money back to working people. But after studying the bill approved last Friday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and child advocacy groups discovered that some of the country’s poorest families, families who make just above the minimum wage, will not receive the kickback.

We’re joined on the phone by Bob Greenstein, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT GREENSTEIN: Thanks for inviting me.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Can you explain who is not getting this tax credit?

ROBERT GREENSTEIN: Well, we’re talking about millions of families, with 12 million children, and incomes up to, depending on the number of children and so forth, could be up to $25,000 a year. For example, a married couple that makes $20,000 a year and has two children will get zero from the new legislation.

AMY GOODMAN: How did this happen?

ROBERT GREENSTEIN: Well, what happened is that one of the centerpieces of the new legislation is to accelerate various provisions, various tax cuts enacted in 2001 that were phasing in over a number of years, so they’d have full effect, take full effect this year. Turns out that what the president proposed and the Congress agreed to was to accelerate all of the high-income provisions and generally provisions for middle-upper middle-income people, but to exclude from the provisions that are being accelerated the two provisions of the 2001 tax law that are focused on working families with children, generally in the $10 to $25 or $30,000 range. One of those provisions was added in the Senate, and it was dumped in the back rooms in conference, so it ends up not being in the final bill. We end up with a situation where these working families with children at $15 or $20,000 a year get nothing, but the average tax cut for people with incomes over a million dollars a year is $93,500 this year under the tax cut. We calculated that if they trimmed very slightly at the top, so that the millionaires got an average tax cut of $88,000 instead of $93,000, they’d have had the money so that there would have been some modest tax cut for these working families with children in the lower income ranges.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington D.C.