Building on the farm bill: A tax reform agenda for conservation

Excerpt

TAX reform is now near the top of the national legislative agenda. This signals a growing consensus that it is time to reexamine the piecemeal, almost random fashion in which the Internal Revenue Code favors certain types of economic behavior at the expense of others in our society and to reform the code to reflect a simpler and more equitable approach.

In this process it is important that Congress give due consideration to those aspects of the tax code that encourage poor stewardship of our country's rich but vulnerable base of agricultural resources. Too often the code seems to penalize rather than reward those who would take good care of the elements fundamental to long-range food and fiber production and a high quality rural environment. In developing new reforms Congress must understand some of the most troubling natural resource problems in American agriculture, recognize some of the unfortunate contributions of the tax code to those problems, and adopt a set of specific reforms, many of which have already taken shape in proposed legislation.

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