ACCOUNTING FOR FEDERAL "TAX SUBSIDIES" IN THE NATIONAL BUDGET

FOR been SOME asserting years, that commentators federal income have been asserting that f deral income tax exemptions, credits, deductions, and rate reductions are the functional equivalents of federal expenditures, and that the failure to acknowledge this parallelism enables these "tax subsidies" to escape the public and congressional scrutiny that accompanies the appropriation of governmental funds. In the Joint Economic Committee's 1955 study of Federal Tax Policy for Economic Growth and Stability, for example, Walter J. Blum observed: