“Lawmakers, Lobbyists Push for New Tax Breaks Through Secret Process”

National Journal:

The Senate’s top tax writers’ “blank slate” approach to tax reform was supposed to give Congress the chance to throw out all tax breaks and start fresh. Instead, lawmakers and lobbyists are using their confidential and off-the-record testimony and letters of support to ask for brand new or expanded tax breaks in addition to the old.

It’s a boondoggle that illustrates the difficulty of sorting through hundreds of breaks, which now cost the federal government more than $1 trillion a year and complicate a tax code that’s already four million words long.

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