Robert Lepore (J.D. 2010, Georgetown) has published Note, Bringing Balance to the Budget Debate: Challenging the Privileged Procedural Status of Regressive Tax Expenditures Over Progressive Discretionary Spending Programs, 17 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y 103 (2010). Here is part of the Introduction:

This paper begins by discussing trends in the use of tax expenditures and describes briefly how political incentives perversely encourage tax expenditures over direct spending in Part I. Part II surveys the many criticisms of tax expenditures, including their intrinsic regressivity as well as their lack of transparency and accountability. Part III discusses possible ways to define tax expenditures – a key threshold question before any structural reform can be undertaken. Finally, Part IV proposes potential procedural budget reforms that could reduce Congress’s temptation to continually expand the size of the tax expenditure budget and could restore parity between tax spending and other types of spending when cuts are necessary. Some of these proposals are new ideas tailored to the current political realities while others are adopted from old or abandoned reform proposals that deserve a new life in the face of the nation’s pressing fiscal challenges and the creeping erosion of the Great Society and New Deal programs on which so many Americans rely.