Perceptions of taxing and spending: A survey experiment

This Note presents the results of an original survey experiment on whether the public prefers “tax expenditures” to “direct outlays”—that is, whether members of the public are more likely to support government spending that takes the form of a tax credit rather than a check or cash. Using a survey that spans a wide variety of policy areas—and with important variations in wording and information—we show that the public strongly prefers tax expenditures even when the economic substance of the proposed policies is identical. We also show that the public views tax expenditures as less costly than equivalent direct outlays. These results support a longstanding but largely unstudied hypothesis that tax expenditures hide the costs of government spending, and have implications for why tax expenditures have continued to grow in size and complexity.