NEWS FLASH
Have Mainstream Media Caught On To Tax Expenditures? | Any serious effort to reduce the deficit will need to include clearing the tax code of what are known as “tax expenditures” — spending programs that are administered through the tax code. Subsidies for Big Oil are an egregious example, but “the amount the government spends on tax expenditures in real dollars has grown from $294 billion in 1977 to $981 billion in 2009 — an increase of more than 230 percent.” The president’s deficit commission and plenty of budget plans (including the Center for American Progress’) call for cutting this wasteful form of spending to reduce the deficit. Gadi Dechter from the Doing What Works project crafted this chart illustrating an uptick in the media mentions of tax expenditures over the last several months, showing that maybe this idea is catching on:
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