Tax Credits or Spending? Labels, but in Congress, Fighting Words
By ANNIE LOWREY, NYT
WASHINGTON — In a low-income neighborhood in Bozeman, Mont., taxpayers helped pay for the construction of a grocery store, Town and Country Foods. They are doing the same in New Orleans, with federal dollars helping to build new groceries, including a Whole Foods, in an area still suffering after Hurricane Katrina.
The Bozeman project relied on tax credits, while New Orleans is using federal grant money. To economists — and to taxpayers — that makes no real difference. “These are at some point arbitrary distinctions between taxes and spending,” said Donald Marron, the director of the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington research group.
But to Congress, it makes all the difference — and is something worth fighting over. As lawmakers struggle to narrow the government’s deficit, every dollar taken away from the block grant program used in New Orleans counts as a budget cut. Every dollar taken away from the Bozeman tax credit program — part of a vast array of so-called tax expenditures that cost the federal government more than $1 trillion in lost revenue every year — counts instead as a tax increase.
In budget proposals put forward last week, both Democrats and Republicans called for scrubbing billions of dollars’ worth of the popular deductions, loopholes, preferential rates and credits that litter the tax code, mostly benefit higher-income taxpayers and often reflect undue government interference in economic decisions. But the two sides are sharply divided what should happen to any revenue raised.
(More here.)
WASHINGTON — In a low-income neighborhood in Bozeman, Mont., taxpayers helped pay for the construction of a grocery store, Town and Country Foods. They are doing the same in New Orleans, with federal dollars helping to build new groceries, including a Whole Foods, in an area still suffering after Hurricane Katrina.
The Bozeman project relied on tax credits, while New Orleans is using federal grant money. To economists — and to taxpayers — that makes no real difference. “These are at some point arbitrary distinctions between taxes and spending,” said Donald Marron, the director of the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington research group.
But to Congress, it makes all the difference — and is something worth fighting over. As lawmakers struggle to narrow the government’s deficit, every dollar taken away from the block grant program used in New Orleans counts as a budget cut. Every dollar taken away from the Bozeman tax credit program — part of a vast array of so-called tax expenditures that cost the federal government more than $1 trillion in lost revenue every year — counts instead as a tax increase.
In budget proposals put forward last week, both Democrats and Republicans called for scrubbing billions of dollars’ worth of the popular deductions, loopholes, preferential rates and credits that litter the tax code, mostly benefit higher-income taxpayers and often reflect undue government interference in economic decisions. But the two sides are sharply divided what should happen to any revenue raised.
(More here.)
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