Another Business Week article contains the following subheadline in its print version:
Obama?s new tax credits will be a boon for preparers ? and a likely stimulus for fraud
While it?s entirely possible that the people who designed these tax credits hoped to help tax preparers, it?s not very likely that anyone wanted to ?stimulate? fraud.
Still, the potential for fraud should have been one of the factors addressed in developing these new credits. The issue would have been addressed if anyone had bothered to apply the one lesson in Henry Hazlitt?s classic Economics in One Lesson:
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Thomas Sowell calls this ?thinking beyond stage one.?
