(CNSNews.com) - At an event celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called to make the policy permanent, also noting that “your life expectancy is connected to your zip code.”

“Your life expectancy is connected to your zip code,” said Brown. “Your life expectancy clearly is determined in many ways - quality of health care, whether you get a good education, social support necessary that you have from the neighborhood organizations, all of that. Obviously it shouldn’t be that way in a country this rich.

“It’s an economic, a moral and political issue,” the senator added. “A recent poll found that 63 percent of Americans believe the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy. So well over half of Americans think the system, think their government works for Wall Street more than it does for Main Street and works better for the elite and the wealthy in this country than it does for people who have little opportunity.”

“The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC or EIC) began in 1975 as a temporary program to return a portion of the Social Security tax paid by lower-income taxpayers,” explains a Congressional Research Service report. “In the 1990s, the program became a major component of federal efforts to reduce poverty, and is now the largest anti-poverty cash entitlement program.”

“When workers’ wages stagnate, and when they struggle to provide for their families, we have a moral problem. When people who work hard and take responsibility and do the best they can, but when they believe the economy is rigged against them, we have a political problem. When the next generation of workers retires with little savings - little or no savings - and no defined pension benefit, we have an economic problem. That’s why the EITC and the child tax credit are so very, very important,” said Brown.

In the State of the Union address, President Obama “laid out plans to reform the tax code by making the EITC and CTC [child tax credit] permanent and expanding credits for workers and middle class families to raise children and save for retirement,” Brown said.

“If you work in this town, or you live in this town and hang around these buildings, what you hear about tax reform is almost always - we’ve got to lower the corporate tax rate,” Brown said. “That’s how the debate has begun. But that’s not how we can - we can’t let the debate begin that way. The president, I thought, for the first time emphatically in the State of the Union began to change that debate that we’re not going to have corporate tax reform until and unless we expand the EITC and make the expansions permanent.”

“My legislation, the Working Families Tax Relief Act, would nearly triple the size of the EITC for workers without children and would expand access to young workers,” he said.

“The Earned Income Tax Credit program began in 1975 as a temporary and small (6.2 million recipients) program to reduce the tax burden on working low-income families,” states the Congressional Research Service. “The program has grown into the largest federal anti-poverty cash program with 27.9 million tax filers receiving $62.9 billion in tax credits for tax year 2011.”