When it comes to retirement savings, the recent stock market collapse has surely focused the mind. For years, we embraced the lovely, but ultimately absurd, idea that double-digit returns on equity investments would continue forever. Now, retirees-in-waiting must get their arms around a market that lost half of its value between June, 2008 and March of this year. In this gut-wrenching environment, how should we think about retirement savings? Harvard law professor Dan Halperin, a visiting scholar at TPC, has a provocative solution: He’d dump all tax-advantaged employer-based retirement savings plans and use the money—nearly $100 billion in 2009-- to enhance Social Security.

I was quoted in the New York Times yesterday, which is kind of fun. Many of my friends read the Times, and it’s a great way to make new friends, and enemies.

Tax Day has come and gone and IRS commissioner Doug Shulman says refunds this year will total roughly $300 billion. About two-thirds of that amount had already gone out to early tax filers by the beginning of this month. That’s a significant amount of money and it could boost the economy—if recipients spend it. In today’s economic environment, that’s a big if.

It’s never too early to plan for next year’s taxes. Let’s say you’re thinking about doing some energy-saving home improvements soon and want to know what federal tax credits are available and how they work. How would you find out? You might try the IRS website. I did but, unfortunately, couldn’t find any information about energy credits for 2009.

Commenter dh has raised a provocative question in response to my post the other day about why I hate filing taxes: “I wonder if the use of tax software actually increased the complexity of the tax code. Perhaps the fact that AMT was reaching a large swatch of the population would (have) been addressed sooner if everyone was required to hire an accountant rather than buy a $50 program to figure it out.”

TPC's Eric Toder will be part of an all-star cast tomorrow to discuss tax expenditures. Eric, who did a terrific paper with Len Burman and...

State revenues are collapsing with the economy. A new study from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government reports that state tax collections fell in the last quarter of 2008 for the first time since 2002 (see graph). Not only did the volatile personal and corporate income tax revenues drop but so did the usually more stable sales taxes—declining by 6 percent before adjusting for inflation.

I still haven’t finished my taxes, probably because it is the civic duty I hate the most. It isn’t the paying that bothers me. It is the process. I hate that I have to give a private company $49.95 to help me perform a basic act of citizenship. I hate that I must sit in front of a computer for hours mindlessly typing in numbers. I hate that the Tax Code is an incomprehensible black box. The software asks for a number. I type it in. It appears on a form, and I, more or less, assume it is right. Mostly, I hate that the Tax Code is so damn complicated.

I’m not doing my taxes. I’ll file them eventually, but the pointless complexity of the income tax makes me crazy. You’d think that I’d have an easier time because I kind of understand the tax law. But I also know that it doesn’t have to be this hard.

Given the season, it is not unreasonable to ask: Why is this state different from all other states? People often want to know if we have state estimates to correspond to our national estimates of particular policies. The answer is always no, and that is what I told someone who asked how many farms and small businesses would owe estate tax in his state under President Obama's proposal. However, I found a very nice table on the IRS website showing number of estate taxpayers and amount owed by state for estate tax returns filed in 2007, so I used those numbers to allocate our national estimates of the number of taxable estates by state. Since the exemption level will be higher in 2011 if Obama's proposal is enacted ($3.5 million in 2011 versus $2 million in 2007), this isn't entirely kosher, but it gives a rough gauge of differences among states.