Please help me out here. See, there's a $100 billion dollar industry in the United States that has enjoyed a federally-mandated moratorium on sales taxes for over a decade, arguing that unless the moratorium is made permanent, small retailers will have a hard time competing against the big, bad guys. As Brian Bieron, the senior director of government relations at eBay, said, fewer small businesses and customers would use the Internet if the ban expires: "That means fewer sales and less opportunity to compete with the mega-retailers."

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) has introduced a bill to roll back tax deductions companies claim for executive stock options. The bill would eliminate the favored tax treatment of corporate stock option deductions, which currently allows companies to deduct the value of stock options for executive at a later date when they are exercised rather than when they are offered. Companies would still be able to deduct the value in the year the options are offered. The Levin bill would also make executive stock option compensation deductions subject to the same $1 million cap on corporate deductions that applies to other types of compensation paid to the top executives of publicly held companies. When introducing the bill, Levin stated: Our bill would end the double standard of companies deducting more from their taxes than the stock option expenses shown on their books. Eliminating unwarranted and excess stock option deductions could mean as much as $5 to $10 billion annually in additional corporate tax revenues that we can't afford to lose. The bill has been refered to the Senate Finance committee. Levin's office has prepared a summary of the bill. You can also read the bill itself and Levin's comments made when introducing the bill in the Senate.

Biology Lesson: Policy Proliferates Progeny The massive-and-still-growing tax bill gestating in the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures -- now in at least its third trimester -- may include not only AMT, EITC and, appropriately, a child tax credit, is hatching yet another embryonic idea: a corporate tax cut. According to yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Ways and Means chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) "is open to cutting corporate-tax rates if the lost revenue can be made up by eliminating existing provisions and loopholes used by businesses."

Prof. Mark Thoma of Economist's View gets real on disingenuous tax policy.