Per BNA, Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus (D-MT) indicated today that the Committee may move to a mark-up of a one-year AMT patch as early as next week. Baucus estimates the cost of the patch at $55 billion but added "It's difficult to come up with offsets that will pass." Committee ranking member Charles Grassley (R-IA) has long said that he prefers forgoing offsets even for an AMT patch, but Baucus says that "my preference is not to waive" PAYGO. Such a waiver would require 60 votes in the Senate.

This afternoon, the House passed H.R. 3678, a four-year extension of the moratorium on state and local internet access taxation. The vote was 405-2. Such opposition to the bill as was voiced came from those who sought a permanent moratorium. From our perspective, the debate on this issue has been oddly one-sided.

Good New York Times op-ed on SCHIP: To hear the Bush administration tell it, expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program would entice hordes of families to drop their private coverage and put their children on the public dole. As the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael Leavitt, argued in a recent television appearance, states that cover middle-income children as well as the poor are essentially telling people to "cancel your private insurance and we'll have the government pay for it." There are several things wrong with that claim.

The world may little note, nor long remember what the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform proposed in its Final Report of November 2005. That may be because the proposal was a mess, actually involving two sets of mutually exclusive, equally politically unpalatable reforms, even for the then-GOP-controlled Congress. It would have been DOA if it had ever formally arrived anywhere. In any event, the Bush administration has now quietly ended the existence of the Panel. So, these questions:

• why even issue an executive order ending the life of the Panel?