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Tax expenditures are any exemption, credit, deduction, or exclusion from the payment of taxes. At the state level, such expenditures often remain unaccounted for, create little economic development, and leave state and local governments with reduced resources for funding basic services such as fire, police, schools, and other general welfare spending. This paper illustrates methods state and local governments use to grant large tax breaks, the resulting financial problems legislators typically solve by raising individual taxes or cutting spending, and the implications for social welfare practitioners.

Data from a radioactive waste disposal area at Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggest that releases depend on site hydrology and waste containment. Loss of packaging integrity has apparently caused episodic increases in 90Sr source strength, followed by gradual reduction as runoff carries contaminants away. Most flow and transport occurs during January–April storms in response to site hydrology. Diversion of runoff from undisturbed areas upstream of the waste site (1983) reduced flow through the site by more than 65% and annual 90Sr release by more than 45%. However, between 1983 and 1994, increases in 90Sr source strength have partially offset the diversion effectiveness. Selective source control in 1996 further reduced annual 90Sr releases by more than 30% in the first two years, compared with pre-treatment conditions. The effectiveness of the grouting treatment should increase over the next 5–10 years, if new 90Sr sources are insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work deals with data-driven control for non-minimum phase (NMP) systems, where the goal is to design a controller for a plant whose model is unknown by using a batch of input-output data collected from it. The approach is based on the Model Reference paradigm, where a transfer function matrix - the reference model - is used to specify the desired closed-loop performance. The NMP systems issue in Model Reference approaches is a well-known problem in control literature and it is no different in data-driven methods. This work explains how to adapt the formulation of the Optimal Controller Identification (OCI) method to cope with this class of systems. Considering a convenient parametrization of the reference model and a flexible performance criterion, it is possible to identify the NMP transmission zeros of the plant along with the optimal controller parameters, as it will be shown. Both diagonal and block-triangular reference model structures are treated in detail. Simulation examples show the effectiveness of the proposed approach., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 International Society of Automation. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)