The buoyant Cohen, Council's all-time leading vote-getter, capped his career with passage of a law that will let lower-income, working-wage taxpayers receive a city wage-tax rebate - and did it over a mayoral veto at age 89.

Now the law designed to move working residents out of poverty is on the chopping block with the Nutter administration's plan to repeal it four years before it is to take effect. Cohen, a Jewish leprechaun who combined a twinkle with the righteousness of an Old Testament prophet, must be looking on in disbelief. "Foul," he might shout, or in the legendary Joe Hill's words, "Organize!"

The rebate would make the 80-year-old regressive wage tax more equitable by helping struggling and working families just like the successful programs it's modeled on: the federal Earned Income Tax Credit and state Tax Back program. It was one of the greatest progressive reforms in City Council history. Cohen was proud of Council, including one of the co-sponsors of the rebate, then-Councilman Nutter. From on high, Cohen likely applauded the new mayor's inaugural promise of a "new Philadelphia" committed to "moving hundreds of thousands out of poverty and on to a better life."

The rebate would do that by putting money directly to families making less than twice of the poverty line - about $35,000 a year for a family of three.

The Pathways PA "self-sufficiency standard" says such a family needs $44,000 a year to make ends meet - no vacations, no car, no eating out, just basics.

A three-person family earning $25,500 a year, qualifying for a full state Tax Back refund, still pays $950 in city wage taxes. Yet that income is almost $20,000 less than the Pathways standard.

Not only will the rebate advance Mayor Nutter's anti-poverty goal, but also, as the Keystone Research Center found, directly stimulate Philadelphia neighborhood economies, with more of the targeted wage-tax dollars benefiting city residents over suburbanites.

Across-the-board wage-tax cuts get used by higher-income and non-resident taxpayers for investments and vacations. They also leak out to the federal government when higher-income taxpayers have a lower city wage tax amount to deduct, so their federal taxable income goes up.

The tax rebate is affordable:

* Gambling revenues would defray most of the cost. As Councilman Bill Green noted, the city hasn't budgeted future gambling-related revenues intended to reduce the wage tax.

_ The city need not continue cutting non-residents' wage taxes, thus saving general fund revenues. Maintaining the lower non-resident tax at 3.7242 percent would still be less than the residents' rate in 2013 of 3.8 percent.

* The city could adjust other planned business tax cuts and target cuts in the gross-receipts and net-income taxes only to small businesses who make the more persuasive case for cuts. The majority of those taxpayers are smaller businesses that pay a minority of the overall $400 million-plus in business-privilege-tax revenues yearly. Do Wal-Mart and other large out-of-town corporations really need a tax cut more than lower-income city working families?

* The rebate cost is exaggerated. Many who are eligible won't apply, yet the city assumes 100 percent will. EITC experience suggests a third is more realistic.

As the fate of the rebate rests in the hands of Cohen's successors, perhaps we should return to the last line of that Joe Hill song: "I never died, says he."

Justice, once born, is mighty tough to repeal. *

Jonathan Stein is general counsel at Community Legal Services and a former member of the Philadelphia Tax Reform Commission.