The myth of Horatio Alger success is so powerful that few concede they live at the lower levels of financial attainment. If they do, it's just a temporary condition -- or so they believe. A Time-CNN poll conducted during the 2000 presidential election asked voters whether they were in the top 1 percent of income earners. Nineteen percent responded that they were, a statistical impossibility.

Perhaps that explains why it has been remarkably easy for the GOP to launch an all-out assault on the poor. With little opposition from advocacy groups and less interest from average Americans, the Bush administration and hard-right Republicans in Congress have squeezed or eliminated essential social programs that assist the poor -- from the HOPE VI program, which has razed slums and rebuilt them as mixed-income communities, to Medicaid, which provides money for health care.

Now Congress has excluded millions of families earning just above minimum wage from the increased child tax credit in the new $350 billion tax-cut bill.

After denouncing critics of his tax cuts for engaging in "class warfare," President Bush passed a huge tax-cut bill that will, indeed, benefit mostly the affluent. But the bill did hand a bone to those among the working and middle classes with families -- an increased child tax credit that will send many families a check this summer for about $400 per child. That tax break was among the few provisions in the gargantuan tax-cut bill that even resembled economic stimulus, since working families are more likely than the rich to spend the money right away on necessities.

But guess who won't be getting the new child tax credit? Millions of working families making between $10,500 and $26,625 a year. In the last-minute negotiations conducted between ultraconservative Republicans and their moderate counterparts, millions of families were cut out of the new child tax credit to make room for other giveaways. That includes 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In other words, that child tax credit will not go to those who need it most. (Families earning less than $10,500 a year were not eligible for the tax credits because they pay no federal income taxes.) It was a deeply cynical maneuver.

Let's be clear: The families denied the child tax credit work for a living. Still, they barely earn enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. It's difficult to pay the bills when you earn little more than $5.15 an hour.

Yet, those workers do essential jobs: They feed, bath and change the elderly in nursing homes; they dig ditches for construction sites; they clean bathrooms in airports and school buildings; they scrub floors in hotels; they cut poultry and pork on grueling assembly lines. They are hardly layabouts.

Once upon a time, their labor was considered honorable. Hardworking men and women who earned a living with their hands and their backs were celebrated as the heart and soul of the American economy. But that was before Ronald Reagan changed the terms of political debate, castigating the poor as lazy, un-American louts responsible for their own sorry lot. It was the most dramatic refashioning of political thought since FDR's New Deal delivered working Americans to the Democratic Party.

Senate negotiators claimed they couldn't extend the increase in child tax credits to minimum-wage families, which would have cost an additional $3.5 billion, because they had to -- just had to -- keep the tax cut package to a mere and manageable $350 billion. Of course, they could have balanced the books by rescinding the deficit-feeding tax cut on stock dividends, which stuffs the purses of the overstuffed.