The temptation to raise taxes on financial institutions is almost too great to resist. These institutions were largely responsible for the recent economic crisis. While the financial collapse cost millions of Americans their livelihoods, many top bank executives happily took their bonuses (in some cases paid with taxpayer money). And the arrogance and sense of entitlement that oozes from some is beyond offensive.

Do we want to use the tax code to subsidize home ownership? And, if we do, is the mortgage interest deduction the best way to do it? A new paper by my Tax Policy Center colleagues Eric Toder and Katherine Lim, along with Urban Institute researchers Margery Turner and Liza Getsinger, asks these provocative questions, and comes up with some surprising answers.

It is not news that state tax revenues have been absolutely hammered in the current economic downturn. But you may be surprised to learn that one local tax has held up relatively well. It is, of all things, the property tax. How can that be, you ask, if so much of the economic mess was caused by a collapse of a housing bubble?

I wasn’t going to write about Congress’ latest effort to continue scores of soon-to-expire special interest tax breaks. But there is something about the joint Ways & Means/ Senate Finance Committee bill’s Orwellian title: “The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act" (AJACTLA) that makes it impossible to ignore.

The bipartisan tax reform proposal of senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Judd Gregg (R-NH) roughly breaks even (as the lawmakers intended) and makes the tax code somewhat more progressive, according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center. TPC analysts Jim Nunns and Jeff Rohaly estimate the Wyden-Gregg plan would raise about $22 billion through 2020 compared to TPC’s “current policy” baseline. That’s a tiny fraction of the $35 trillion Treasury is expected to collect over the decade. The reform plan—called the Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010 (BTSFA or S. 3018)-- would lose a bit in the first few years, but generate slowly increasing amounts of new tax revenue after that.

News reports suggest that the Senate may soon consider restoring the estate tax with an option allowing people to prepay their tax before they die. Details are apparently still in flux as senators negotiate. We—and maybe they--don’t know yet what they’ll propose for the basic estate tax but it’s unlikely to be harsher than the 2009 version.

can’t resist jumping into the ongoing debate between New York Times economic columnists David Leonhardt and Paul Krugman. David worries that there are troubling similarities between the current Greek debt crisis and huge ongoing deficits in the U.S. “Nonsense,” replies Paul, who argues that the two nations have about as much in common as souvlaki and cheeseburgers. My take: The U.S. is not Greece. But this does not mean we cannot learn lessons from a nation that is marked by both great beauty and regular bouts of fiscal madness.

Ezra Klein interviewed James Galbraith, who argued quite forcefully that “the danger [posed by the long-term deficit] is zero. It’s not overstated. It’s completely misstated.” We now have an answer to the trivia question, “What do James Galbraith and Dick Cheney have in common?” Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

In 1983, Ronald Reagan proposed eliminating the federal corporate income tax. Last week, Michael Boskin took up the charge. I have another idea: Get rid of the state corporate income tax. State corporate income taxes are lineal descendents of the federal version and share many of its flaws. They doubly tax income at the firm and individual level, penalize businesses that organize as corporations, and reward debt versus equity finance. They also are very sensitive to the business cycle, and tend to plunge when the economy sags.

TaxVox’s very first article—in October, 2007—was about congressional efforts to tax the compensation of hedge fund and private equity managers as ordinary income rather than capital gains. For three years now, the House has passed such a tax on this income, known as carried interest. And for three years the levy has died in the Senate.