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.

At a fascinating TPC panel this afternoon, TPC’s Bob Williams, former CBO director (and McCain economic adviser) Doug Holtz-Eakin, former top Ronald Reagan tax adviser John (Buck) Chapoton, and Center on Budget & Policy Priorities executive director Bob Greenstein all wrestled with the nature—and future--of our progressive tax system.

As taxvox blogmeister, Howard Gleckman, noted last week, the estate tax is once again in play in Congress. TPC has updated our estate tax estimates to reflect the latest CBO projections and IRS data. The main factor driving the revisions is that there's a lot less wealth to tax now than there was a year ago. The new tables show the distribution of returns, value of estate, and estate tax by size of estate for 4 policy options in 2011.

Since his election, President Obama and his top aides have frequently cast the economic crisis as an opportunity to push his agenda of change. Now, three months into his presidency, we are getting a good sense of how he and the Democratic Congress intend to use that opportunity.

President Obama wants to maintain the 2009 rules on the estate tax—in effect allowing couples with assets of as much as $7 million to pass on their wealth tax free. Amazingly, this has some critics of the levy railing about confiscatory taxes. Art Laffer even argued in this morning’s Wall Street Journal that Obama's estate tax plan would short-circuit an economic recovery.

If there are any ranches in Detroit, President Obama has just bet one on his yet-unborn plan to cap greenhouse gasses. Obama has effectively ordered GM and Chrysler to build more fuel-efficient cars in return for billions more in federal bailout money. But will enough people buy those cars with gas at $2-a-gallon to make this a successful strategy?

On March 24, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, said this about the President’s budget: “Not only are we mortgaging our children's future; we are mortgaging our current prosperity. The President is proposing a gusher of new debt, new taxes, and more spending.” We are, he concluded, “on a massive borrowing, taxing, and spending spree.” The only problem is that Ryan and other Republicans are perfectly happy to propose spending increases of their own, as long as they are masked as tax cuts. The House GOP leadership is proposing a package of massive new housing subsidies, including a $5,000 credit for those who refinance their homes and a $15,000 credit for buyers. I hate to break the news, but these tax credits are spending.

President Obama announced yesterday that he has asked former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to head a new tax reform panel that will make recommendations by December 4th. This is great news. The current tax system is a complicated mess and can’t produce the revenues we will need in the coming years. But there is no reason for Volcker to reinvent the wheel. His panel could start by looking at the work of a bipartisan tax reform panel established by President Bush in 2005. I may be biased, since I served as the staff’s chief economist, but I think we designed a pretty good blueprint.