Underpinning the bishops’ complaint about the Admistration’s rule to require contraception coverage in health insurance is the idea that nobody in America should have to assent to government policies that violate their personal beliefs. This comes as news to committed pacifists.

In an impressive bit of caving, the House Republican leadership has given up on finding offsets for the payroll tax cut, proposing a bill that would extend the current cut to the end of the year without any funding. However, the other two pieces that were tied to the overall legislation at the end of last year, extended unemployment benefits and the “doc fix” to avoid a reset of Medicare reimbursement rates, would not be included.

The Obama budget is proposing to tax dividends for high-income taxpayers as ordinary income. This is not a change on capital gains, it’s on dividends, the money earned through corporate payouts of profits to shareholders. The capital gains tax rate would rise to 20% from 15% under the Obama proposal, consistent with prior years.

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than policy. It’s a simple fact that the Administration has wanted a deficit deal for some time, and that this budget will build in a deficit deal. They’re going about it in a smarter way with a higher bid in the negotiations.

Conservatives are ready to suffer to avoid taxes on themselves and others. My advice: stop listening to right-wing radio. Those people make you feel bad about yourself, when the problems aren’t your fault.

The jobs programs and higher taxes on the wealthy are at the top of the priority list. But all of the elements that the Administration has sought from the beginning of their term – a total of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, the “lower the rate, broaden the base” perspective on corporate taxes, an extension of the Bush tax cuts for 98% of the population, still remain in this document. We’re really talking about tone.

War has broken out between West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania over who can give away more tax dollars to Shell Oil.

I often have conversations with people who don’t exist to illustrate real conversations I know about and have a 93% confidence level have actually happened. Here’s a conversation I had last night about Mitt, taxes, GE and strippers.

I don’t know if anything’s going to get done in Congress in 2012, but one thing is becoming clear – Senate Democrats will try to put Republicans up against the wall on taxes. They already have on the record multiple instances of Republicans voting almost in unison against millionaire’s surtaxes. Now we’ll see votes on fossil fuel subsidies and that alternative minimum corporate tax the President mentioned in the State of the Union and other tax fairness issues.

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.