> It requires significantly less political capital to create a new tax cut or subsidy than to raise taxes or allocate new spending directly. This is an incredi

> It requires significantly less political capital to create a new tax cut or subsidy than to raise taxes or allocate new spending directly. This is an incredibly important point, and one that I wish would come up more often. The reason that the US tax code is such a cluster@%&$ is because we insist (for reasons of politics) on conducting our fiscal policy almost entirely through the tax code, rather than just, you know, spending money directly on the stuff we want to invest in.