This focus on tax preferences is a healthy development. Unfortunately, it has been accompanied by rhetorical flourishes that sometimes obfuscate America's real policy challenges. Tax reformers and deficit hawks often refer to tax preferences as loopholes or special-interest provisions. The president's fiscal commission even called them "tax earmarks." Those epithets make for good, quotable copy, and occasionally they even ring true. There is one tax provision, for example, that has as its sole purpose lowering taxes on NASCAR venues. That's certainly heading into earmark territory.