How Federal Policymakers Account for the Concerns of State and Local Governments in the Formulation of Federal Tax Policy‪.‬

INTRODUCTION In Showdown at Gucci Gulch (Birnbaum and Murray, 1987), chronicling the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the issues of state and local tax preferences are front and center. The lobbying effort to remove from the Administration's proposal the repeal of state and local tax deductions was "one of the most persistent and pervasive lobbying campaigns of the tax reform story" (p. 113). That effort succeeded in preserving, in this watershed tax reform, the full deduction in the House, and all but the sales tax deduction in the Senate. The final proposal eliminated the sales tax deduction, but in 2004 the deduction was restored as an option to the income tax deduction.