Eric Toder, Elaine Maag, and Frank Sammartino perform a useful service in summarizing the tangled mess of red tape by which the U.S. government seeks to provide social insurance to low-income families through the tax system. Max Sawicky and company have a nice proposal for basically rolling all of the different tax-expenditure programs into one.

Should things turn out well in November, 2003 might actually see some red tape-cutting and program-rationalizing reform. But action will have to come from the Congressional side...

Tax Policy Center | A Project of the Urban Institute & the Brookings Institution

...Tax incentives are popular because they represent a way of increasing federal support for social policy, while seeming to cut taxes rather than increase spending. Compared with direct outlay programs with similar goals, tax incentives better meet the need of politicians to expand programs while appearing to restrain the size of government. That is, the incentives show up as tax cuts rather than spending increases, even if they have the same economic effect. Consequently, they often appear more politically attractive than spending programs designed to achieve the same ends. Federal budget rules established in the 1990s encouraged the growth of tax expenditures. The rules established under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act were an initial attempt by Congress to force spending discipline by setting specific dollar targets for federal deficits. While those rules were ultimately unsuccessful, they did pave the way for the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (BEA). BEA, which was extended in 1993 and 1997, constrained discretionary spending by setting specific dollar limits (spending caps) for different categories of outlays. It also required that tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in the budget offset any increase in mandatory spending (which includes most programs that provide income support to low-income families). The discretionary outlay ceilings and pay-as-you-go requirement effectively curtailed both new spending initiatives and significant increases in existing spending programs...