Obama Budget Would Expand Low-Income Tax Break --- WASHINGTON — When President Obama releases his proposed annual budget on Tuesday, he will grab his best opportunity of the year to show, in one comprehensive package of hard numbers and precise detail, how he would have the government address what he has called “the defining challenge of our time” — economic inequality. -- Many of Mr. Obama’s perennial proposals on education, job training, research and more have hit a Republican wall in Congress, but this year the president is adding one with echoes of Republicans’ own ideas. He will propose expanding a longstanding tax break to better benefit workers who are childless, which the White House estimates will help 13.5 million additional Americans who hold jobs yet remain poor. The current tax break favors low-wage workers with children. -- Mr. Obama would offset the costs, $60 billion over 10 years, by ending two tax breaks for some wealthy taxpayers, as a Republican House leader also recently proposed as part of a broader plan to overhaul the tax code. The changes would close loopholes that lower taxes for some self-employed professionals and investment-fund managers. --- So the White House is eager to draw attention to an idea that might be taken seriously, both in the news media and in Congress. -- Advisers say Mr. Obama will propose to double a childless worker’s maximum tax credit to about $1,000 a year and increase the annual income level for qualifying for some benefit to about $18,000 annually, roughly 50 percent over the federal poverty line for a single adult. The credit would also be available to workers at age 21 instead of 24, as long as they are living on their own, and remain available longer, until the age of 67 rather than 65. -- The earned-income tax credit began as a Republican policy decades ago to reward work and discourage welfare, and has been expanded through the years — by Mr. Obama and predecessors of both parties — mainly to help families with children. But for childless adults and those whose children are not in their custody, the credit has remained small and phases out at low incomes. -- Making it more generous for such workers “just makes a lot of sense,” said David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, especially as more young males have been dropping out of the labor force. “Many of them do not have dependents, or their dependents are with the mom. Giving them more incentive to work seems like an excellent idea.” -- More, JACKIE CALMES, NYTimes, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/us/politics/obama-budget-would-expand-low-income-tax-break.html?hp&_r=0