This week's Samuelson Watch is outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

via CQ($): Responding to Congressional appropriators' suggestion that an income tax surcharge might be used to pay for future operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a livid House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) played the "partisan" card to avoid making fiscally responsible decisions about war spending. Raiding every taxpayer's wallet for the purposes of playing politics with our national security amounts to some of the most irresponsible public policy I've seen in a long, long time.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has released a new analysis examining a dangerous proposal to allow for an unlimited exemption within the estate tax for farmland. CBPP believes this proposal might be offered as an amendment to the Senate Finance committee markup of the farm bill. The CBPP report finds such a proposal:

• Would likely prove extremely costly because it would create strong incentives for wealthy individuals to convert large amounts of their estates into qualifying farmland.
• Could undermine its own goals. If wealthy individuals seeking to shield assets from the estate tax bid up the price of farmland, that would make it more difficult for genuine family farmers to keep their farms in their families and could discourage others of ordinary means from entering farming.

Instead, CBPP states that making the current exemption ($4 million per couple) or the 2009 exemption ($7 million per couple) permanent would more than protect farm estates and would be simpler, more administrable, and less open to abuse.

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.