A tax-day miscellany

Have you filed your tax return yet? If you prepared it yourself, congratulations on navigating that complex web of forms and instructions, an ongoing complexity brought to you by a strange lobby comprised of tax-preparation companies and antitax activists.

Senate Republicans blocked the Buffett Rule yesterday, a sad moved surpassed in sadness perhaps only by the smallness of the proposed minimum tax itself. The Buffett Rule is neither as simple nor as bold as the president's summary of it suggests. Instead of simplifying the tax code to get rid of loopholes that favor the wealthy, it would try to counteract them somewhat by adding to the layers of rules. And as Patrick Caldwell argues, it would "set $1 million as the de facto cutoff for who qualifies as wealthy"--it would implicitly reinforce the people who claim with a straight face that their $400,000 income doesn't buy what it used to, that they're just struggling middle-class folks, too.

Better than nothing? Sure, if those are the options. But the Buffett Rule raises all the old questions about whether doing something small and symbollic will make it harder to do something substantive later. As a supporter of tax reform aimed at more progressive real tax rates, I'm not convinced that the policy makes this thing worth passing.