“Most of the big tax expenditures have an incredibly corrosive effect on tax fairness and would never pass muster if they were funded as direct-spending programs rather than tax breaks,” said Matt Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington-based group that has pushed to end some tax expenditures. “If any federal government entity proposed a $72 billion housing subsidy that reserved almost half its benefits for those earning over $200,000 a year, they’d be rightly laughed out of town. But when it’s done through the tax code, policymakers can go years or even decades at a time without even having to defend the effectiveness of this spending. It’s a pernicious double standard.”
December 15, 2015
International Business Times: Tax Code To Direct $2 Trillion To Programs That Disproportionately Benefit The Rich And Corporations
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