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.

Eric Schneiderman, co-chair of the newly titled “RMBS working group” investigating financial fraud, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show last night (the interview starts around the 5:00 mark), and there were a few interesting moments. First you have his assessment of the the fraud involved here, which he definitively cast as a pre-crisis issue. Schneiderman, from his public statements, is less concerned with the faulty documentation used to foreclose on borrowers; I would imagine he sees this as the cover-up for the initial crime of securitization fraud, and going back even further origination fraud. He sees that as where the banks’ real exposure lies. And so the working group will look at “all of the conduct that blew up the economy,” not the conduct being engaged in to paper over (literally) all that.

President Obama has been traveling the country championing his doomed America Jobs Act as his plan to address the jobs crisis. But during the same time Obama has been publicly flogging this dead show bill, his administration was actually implementing policies and pushing legislation through Congress that will destroy tens of thousand of jobs in this country.

When Barack Obama ran for president he promised to respect the states’ medical marijuana laws. But since taking office Obama has been steadily using more and more parts of the federal government to wage a war on medical marijuana.

A pattern is clearly forming. The Obama administration is using multiple federal departments to curb or significantly cripple the medical marijuana in the states were it was legalized by the voters. This recent move is not only another direct violation of Obama’s campaign promise to respect state’s medical marijuana laws, but the Obama administration’s is now more aggressively anti-medical marijuana than even the George W. Bush’ administration ever was.

The IRS has ruled that Harborside Health Center, one of California’s largest medical marijuana dispensaries, owes $2.5 million in taxes, because it took ordinary business deductions when Congress said such facilities can’t. Such a large tax bill could potentially force Harborside out of business.

It takes the offer of amnesty to get rich people to reveal their offshore bank accounts. Finally, after years of neglect, the IRS has actually bothered to look into all this. But they had to assure the oligarchs that they wouldn’t be prosecuted for tax evasion, of course.

We now have a CBO report on Harry Reid’s plan, and what once again sticks out is the extreme similarities with John Boehner’s. Remember that the Boehner plan had discretionary spending caps, a “Super Congress” committee to recommend deficit reduction, spending on program integrity for several programs, increases in Pell grants offset by student loan changes, and other budget process changes

Because we could all use a bit of good news:

– The local Chambers of Commerce agree with Minnesota’s most powerful functioning adult, Governor Mark Dayton, and a majority of Minnesotans that revenue increases, particularly tax increases, must be part of any state budget compromise. This puts them squarely at odds with the hyperactive frat-boy Republicans running the Minnesota state legislature. Can the state Republicans live solely off the support of out-of-state far-right Koch front groups like ALEC? I wouldn’t bet on it, especially with the next news item:

– The IRS is telling big donors to political campaigns that their donations could be subject to gift taxes, something that might put a cramp in the notoriously tax-averse Koch brothers’ style.

I agree that any serious deficit reduction plan should include an increase to the IRS budget. But there’s a way to get to this level of revenue without hoping that every tax cheat gets caught, and it’s pretty simple: let the Bush tax cuts expire.