South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The Baseline Scenario weighs in on the interactive tax expenditure database recently compiled by the Pew Charitable  Trusts.

Tax expenditures primarily benefit the rich, for a few reasons.
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First, most of them are deductions from taxable income, which means their value to you is proportional to your marginal tax rate….
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Second, because most of them are itemized deductions, you only get them if you itemize your deductions–which usually means either that you have a big enough house to have a big mortgage or you have enough income to pay a lot of state and local taxes.
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Third, the size of the deduction is highly correlated with income. To take the most obvious example, rich people have bigger houses, and so they have bigger mortgages….
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Fourth, there are the tax expenditures that you get on investments, which are disproportionately held by the rich. There’s the tax exemption for life insurance investments. There’s the big one: tax-advantaged investment accounts, including 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs, 529s, etc….
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Fifth, there are the tax expenditures for businesses, since in theory those flow to their shareholders, who are disproportionately the rich….