Is the growing number of social programs injected into the tax code a good thing?
No, a cost is a cost, so let’s be honest about it. We pretend that if the government provides education through the tax system, then that’s a tax cut, not a spending program. But if the government puts more money into vouchers or Pell Grants that help low-income people go to college, that’s government growth and we’re spending more money. By this logic, Pell Grants are bad, whereas the tax credits are good. It’s simply not true. Some things make sense to do through the tax system. For instance, having a subsidy [EITC] for low-income people who work. But the huge panoply of social programs injected into the tax code complicates it horribly, and not all these programs help the people they’re supposed to help. Let’s go back to education subsidies. The 35 to 40 percent of households that don’t pay any income taxes don’t get any benefit from nonrefundable tax credits and deductions, which is what these education tax subsidies are. So it’s not helping low-income people get to college. It’s h
