The Atlantic: The Tax Break Dividing the Republican Party

“You can never really know if they’re changing people’s behavior,” said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Gardner pointed me to a quote from Paul O’Neill, President George W. Bush’s first Treasury secretary, who told a Senate committee at his 2001 confirmation hearing: “If you want to give me inducements for something I am going to do anyway, I will take it. But good business people do not do things for inducements.”

The argument that conservatives are making against full expensing is not that it’s ineffective but that it stands in the way of a simpler, flatter tax code in which the government does not play favorites and “pick winners and losers.” Read more