A few weeks back, I discussed proposals to reduce obesity by taxing junk food. I argued that such a tax could encourage healthier eating but would be difficult to design and would hit low-income families the hardest. Now a new report by the University of Virginia’s Carolyn Engelhard and Arthur Garson and the Urban Institute’s Stan Dorn addresses some of these issues.

I was going to make a (fiscal) new year's resolution to stop picking on California. There are, after all, 49 other states doing things that don’t necessarily pass the good governance test, but the latest Golden State deal warrants comment. It would close the reputed $26 billion deficit by cutting spending by $15.5 billion, selling off assets, and deferring payments. Despite histrionics, the agreement comes less than a month into the budget year, much sooner than in past years.

Now that the House has decided to give away, rather than auction, most CO2 emission permits, I’ve been wondering how Treasury is going to tax this windfall. There is a huge amount of money at stake--by some estimates more than $100 billion-a-year in emissions permits. Remember, how they would work: Congress would turn the right to emit CO2 into a valuable, saleable asset. Into, one might say, money. The companies that receive these permits—mostly big producers or generators of fossil fuels such as oil refiners or utilities—could either use them for the right to pollute or sell them.

Imagine you are a successful business owner confronting the House Democrats’ proposed tax rate hike. Your first question: How do I shelter as much of my income as possible? Will one answer be to buy the richest, most generous health insurance policy you can find? It only makes sense. Why take cash compensation that could face a top rate of more than 45 percent when you could easily get more tax-free health insurance? Forget Cadillac plans. Now we’re talking Lamborghini coverage.

Now we know how many American taxpayers will be asked to pay for health reform under the new tax rate structure being designed by House Democrats: about 2 million. That would be a bit more than 1 percent of all taxpayers. They’d be asked to pay an additional $540 billion in taxes over the next 10 years, while those making less than $350,000 would be asked to contribute approximately nothing. Seems fair to me. According to the draft House bill, starting in 2011 those making more than $1 million would pay a surcharge of 5.4 percent. Add that to President Obama’s plan to restore the pre-Bush top rate of 39.6 percent and the new maximum marginal rate would be an even 45 percent. You can also add a couple of extra percentage points thanks to Obama’s plan to restore the pre-Bush limits on personal exemptions (PEP) and itemized deductions (Pease).

A few thoughts on the House Democrats’ still-evolving plan to pay for close to half of health reform by raising marginal rates on the highest earning taxpayers: *By allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, restoring the phase-outs of the personal exemption (PEP) and itemized deductions (Pease), and now by proposing a ‘surcharge” of 2 percent or more, Democrats would be boosting the top individual tax rate from the Bush-era 35 percent to nearly 45 percent, ever-closer to the 50 percent top rate of 1985.

Congressional Democrats, having apparently lost patience with the first Obama stimulus, are beating the drum for yet another round of government money to pump up the still-lagging economy. They need to take a deep breath. Lori Montgomery wrote a nice piece in yesterday’s Washington Post explaining why. Using some data from Mark Zandi at Economy.com, Lori reports that barely $100 billion of last winter’s nearly $800 billion stimulus has made its way into the economy. Until the rest is spent, why would we want to run up the debt by hundreds of billions more?

Nearly half of all families and individuals will pay no income tax this year. But who are they? It turns out that whether a taxpayer is single or married, is elderly, or has children makes a big difference. Nearly 47 percent of single tax units will owe no tax, compared with about 40 percent of joint filers and over 70 percent of household heads. About 55 percent of the elderly and tax units with children will pay no tax. Two factors primarily explain the variation: differences in income and available tax preferences.

A long-simmering dispute over whether online retailers must collect sales taxes is boiling over again. Two Web retailing giants, Amazon.com and Overstock.com, are severing relationships with local businesses in states that are trying to force them to collect the levy, angering cash-strapped states and sending bloggers into an on-line frenzy. There are three things you should know about this squabble. 1. It has nothing whatever to do with ‘taxing the Internet.” 2. You owe the tax anyway. Amazon would make the paperwork easier for its customers by collecting the money at the time of sale, but whether it does so or not, you still have to pay. Not that many of us do, but that is another story. 3. According to one estimate, by 2012 state and local governments will be losing as much as $12 billion annually from uncollected taxes on online sales. There is real money at stake here.

Last year’s election campaign sparked a major debate over refundable tax credits. Barack Obama insisted they were the only way to make tax benefits available to low-income households. (If you have no tax liability, you get a cash payment.) Critics countered loudly: How can you cut taxes for people who don’t pay them? And there are a lot of non-taxpayers—under 2008 law, the Tax Policy Center estimated 38 percent of all tax units would pay no income tax in 2009.