Over the years, the EITC has played different tax policy, labor market, and antipoverty roles. In section , we review the political history of the EITC, its rules, and its goals, and we provide a broad set of program sta- tistics that summarize its growth and coverage. Various goals of the pro- gram occasionally come into conflict. For example, when the EITC was in- creased as part of the 1993 budget bill, it was singled out as an important antipoverty program that has positive (relative to alternatives) labor mar- ket incentives. Around the same time, however, studies of EITC noncom- pliance suggested that the credit was difficult for.
