Tax-Exempt Financing: Some Lessons from History
通过考察1916年至重组期间联邦农业土地银行系统的经验，从历史角度探讨免税融资是否是最佳方法、是否会对其他经济部门造成成本等问题。
TAX-EXEMPr FINANCING designed to influence capital flows to specific sectors of the economy is now a familiar feature of the capital markets. Municipal mortgage bonds and the new all-saver's certificates established by the Reagan administration are but two recent examples of such financing schemes. 1 In spite of this omnipresence, important questions regarding the efficacy and even the desirability of using the tax-exemption feature remain unanswered. Is tax-exempt financing the best method of assisting a particular sector? Can such financing be structured so that changes intended to help the targeted sector do not impose significant costs on other sectors of the economy? Does it make economic sense to manipulate the capital markets for a specific special interest? This paper provides a historical approach to answering these questions by examining the experiences of the first major tax-exempt financed program, the Federal Farm Land Bank (FFLB) system, from its inception in 1916 to its reorganization in