How to end tax expenditures the right way

[by JSC5]

As per Ezra Klein in today’s Wonkbook, Martin Feldstein has a plan for decreasing the deficit: end tax expenditures.

Now, regular readers of the blog will remember tax expenditures from one of my old posts inspired by the craziness of Hawaii’s ‘Exceptional Tree’  tax deduction. The basic point to remember with tax expenditures is that they give people money through the tax code instead of by cutting them a check directly. In many ways, tax expenditures and direct spending are exactly the same: the net effect on recipients is the same (they get more money), and the net effect on the government is the same (it gets less revenue).

But tax expenditures come with a whole host of negative effects. By making Swiss cheese of the tax code, they make compliance overly complicated. They distort work and income incentives. They don’t need to be reauthorized, so they tend to persist for a long time without any legislator taking a look at them and making sure they’re still a good idea. Furthermore, most people miscategorize tax expenditures as tax cuts instead of spending, so they are easier to enact and harder to repeal than regular spending programs. Just about any economist would tell you that we should run spending programs through normal spending procedures while keeping our tax code standardized and simple.

So it’s unsurprising that veteran economist/conservative political operative Martin Feldstein has come out against tax expenditures. As a foe of tax expenditures myself, I heartily welcome the support. And yet I find it hard to really trust his plan. Let me explain.

Feldstein begins his argument for cutting tax expenditures by mentioning three areas in particular that rely on the tax code for spending: education, child care, and health insurance. One gigantic tax expenditure – the mortgage-interest tax deduction – doesn’t get a mention until the very end of the article, when Feldstein says it’s probably best to  slightly reduce (not eliminate) the deduction “to avoid economic disruptions.” Did you catch the pattern? Tax expenditures that liberals and Democrats support get the axe. Tax expenditures that conservatives and Republicans support are handled with kid gloves, since – gosh! – they’re particularly important!

The lesson I draw from reading Feldstein’s politically-opportunistic support for tax expenditures is this: if we’re really going to end spending programs through our tax code, then we need to do it all at once and for everything. If you take it issue-by-issue, then there’s always going to be a big lobby in support of that particular expenditure and a small minority whose primary concern is tax expenditures in general. Mr. X is a high income homeowner and votes yes on eliminating education tax credits and no on mortgage-interest deductions. Mrs. Y is a low-income renter and votes the opposite way. Nothing gets done.

My proposal is simple: pass one bill to eliminate tax expenditures as a way to run programs and automatically convert all tax expenditures into equally-sized direct expenditures. Everyone congressperson who dislikes tax expenditures as a tool of government can get on board — regardless of the actual content of any particular tax expenditure. Tax expenditures won’t get used as a political football by advocates with an axe to grind. Then we can leave decisions about actual levels of spending to a case-by-case review at Congress’s leisure.

We get the benefits of a vastly-simplified tax code, with easy compliance and standard, predictable incentives. And small government conservatives would still find plenty to like here. The calculus has changed: everyone now realizes that these are real dollars being spent, moving through the regular appropriations process.

That’s what real concern about tax expenditures looks like. And that’s why I doubt Professor Feldstein’s commitment to Sparkle Motion.