Center for American Progress

Being ‘fiscally responsible’ means cleaning up wasteful tax expenditures
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Being ‘fiscally responsible’ means cleaning up wasteful tax expenditures

Author Alexandra Thornton argues that Congress must address wasteful spending through the U.S. tax code and explains how scaling back tax expenditures could yield significant revenue and make the tax code fairer.

In 2017, President Donald Trump promised a new tax law that would “dramatically simplify the tax code” and “eliminate special interest loopholes.” As the bill that would become the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) took shape, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said that congressional Republican leaders were going to be “throwing out the special-interest loopholes that riddle the code.”

But by the time the tax law crossed the president’s desk, the tax code was still littered with special tax breaks — some old and some new.

The above excerpt was originally published in MarketWatch. Click here to view the full article.

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Authors

Alexandra Thornton

Senior Director, Financial Regulation