Six Of One, Half-Dozen Of The Other

Bruce Bartlett sees little difference between tax credits and direct spending:

To see just how similar a refundable tax credit is to direct spending, imagine that instead of having the Defense Department pay $1 billion to Lockheed Martin...for some spare parts for the Air Force, it instead gave it a $1 billion refundable tax credit that was tradable. If Lockheed Martin didn't have at least a $1 billion federal tax liability, it could simply sell the unused portion to another company that did. Either way the company gets paid $1 billion and $1 billion worth of resources are extracted from the private sector for government's use.