In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Robert Greenstein, suggested that cutting tax expenditures (i.e., spending delivered through the tax code), and not program cuts, should be the focus of attempts to bring our federal deficit under control.

Below are excerpts from CBPP’s Off the Charts blog:

The costs of tax expenditures are large.  In 2010, individual tax expenditures totaled nearly $1 trillion, and total tax expenditures – both individual and corporate – amounted to $1.05 trillion.  This greatly exceeded the cost of Medicare and Medicaid combined ($719 billion), Social Security ($701 billion), and non-security discretionary programs, which stood at $589 billion, a little over half of the cost of tax expenditures.