Law Commons^™

Tax Policy And Panda Bears, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

In this article, Professors Kahn and Lehman argue that the concept of tax expenditures is flawed as a tool for measuring the propriety of tax provisions. It assumes the existence of one true and correct standard of dederal income taxation that applies to all circumstances. To make that assumption, the proponents of the concept implicitly make a particular moral claim about the relative importance of a wide range of values, including efficiency, consumption/savings neutrality, privacy, distributional equity, administrability, charity, and pragmatism. They then measure a tax provision's "normalcy"exclusively by how it conforms to their Platonic concept of income.

Professors Kahn …