Source: Jennifer DePaul, Bond Buyer, July 25, 2013
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Congress should consider eliminating tax exemption and privatizing infrastructure to subject it to property taxes in order to broaden the tax base, a director from the right-leaning think tank, Cato Institute, said this week. “Federal infrastructure spending often gets bogged down in mismanagement and cost overruns,” Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at Cato, told members of the Joint Economic Committee at a hearing on Wednesday…
…Edwards argued that state and local governments are likely to make better investments without federal subsidies and regulations that may distort their decisions. There has been a history of “pork-barrel politics and bureaucratic mismanagement of many types of federal investment,” he said. He called tax exemption for municipal bonds a “hurdle” to private infrastructure investment, claiming financing by using muni bonds “stacks the decks against the private provision of infrastructure.”…
