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What You Need to Know about Tax Incentives and the Federal Budget (infographic)

Posted on July 19, 2016

The federal budget consists of revenue (mostly taxes, but also things like user fees and intragovernmental revolving funds) and spending.

But not all spending looks the same. Spending through tax provisions—known as tax incentives or expenditures—is not as well-known as other types of federal spending, such as discretionary spending on federal programs, or spending on Social Security and other entitlement programs.

Yet tax expenditures totaled more than $1.2 trillion in fiscal year 2015—roughly what is spent on discretionary federal spending. And they didn’t have the scrutiny of other types of federal spending.

Learn more about tax expenditures and how they’re evaluated in our latest infographic:

 

Spending Through the Tax Code infographic