The Benefit and the Burden begins with a short history of American taxation and a description of the core issues in the definition of income. It follows with some discussion of the principal economic arguments that have flowed around the relationship between taxes, growth and fairness, and then proceeds to examine the issues surrounding preferences in our tax code – for housing, for charitable contributions, for capital gains, and the problem of taxing corporate profits. It ends with a discussion of reform proposals, and Bruce makes his case for a VAT to close the revenue gap and fund the government that we will need, among other things, to support an increasingly elderly population.

Obama’s fighting the class war with nerf cannons and water pistols.

Whatever S&P’s agenda, it has nothing to do with avoiding default risks or putting the US on sound fiscal footing. It’s time the media and Congress started asking them what their political agenda is and whom it serves.

Bruce Bartlett is the latest to point out that all the conservative demagoguery about America’s crushing, business-destroying tax burden is completely devoid of any context in time or space. Our actual tax revenues are very low both chronologically and geographically.

Much to the dismay of the Teabaggers, no doubt, Bruce Bartlett points out — again — that taxes are low in the United States.

Helpful advice for Republican presidential hopefuls on how to distinguish themselves between now and next year’s primaries.

A while back Jake McIntyre wrote an interesting post (for which he was widely pilloried) noting that the same people who supported this bill were those who supported the Iraq war. Not a coincidence. The health care bill is a neoliberal victory, just as the Iraq war represented a neoliberal triumph. As willyloman said in a Seminal diary yesterday, neoliberalism is now being rebranded as populism, with the President acting as chief salesman. But in emails like this, and Nancy Pelosi’s trumpeting of the bill’s Heritage Foundation roots, it’s clear that the Democrats know what they’ve done. They have no intention of reversing themselves now. And they are consciously punching the progressive hippies whose messaging and ideals brought them their majorities in the first place.

Noted left-wing activist Bruce Bartlett read David Frum’s recent survey of a bunch of Teabaggers, and finds their grasp of the issues, erm, lacking.