From POLITICO: “ATR policy director Ryan Ellis said Coburn’s amendment does not require an offsetting tax cut and would therefore raise taxes by nearly $4.9 billion over the next two years…The best policy outcome, Ellis wrote, ‘is to eliminate the ethanol tax credit in a way that leaves money in the hands of taxpayers, not increases the amount of money going to Washington for the Appropriations Committees to spend. Your amendment as written to repeal the ethanol credit (unfortunately) does the latter.’”
From Richard Rubin in Bloomberg “The philosophical debate between Coburn and Norquist turns on the question of whether there is a meaningful distinction between targeted tax breaks and targeted spending. ‘If the government lets Tom Coburn keep a dollar of his own money, that is not the same thing as the government stealing a dollar from Ryan Ellis and giving it to Tom Coburn,’ wrote Ryan Ellis, the group’s tax policy director. ‘The differences between tax relief and spending are unambiguous.’”