Recently, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has been issuing reports challenging conventional thinking about the long-term fiscal problem facing the nation, which holds that it is primarily related to the influence of demographic changes on Social Security and Medicare. These reports draw on the work of researchers and writers who found that the long-term fiscal challenge is almost entirely unrelated to demographics and Social Security, and it is mostly confined to inefficiencies in the private and public health care system.

On Nov. 14, the Senate Finance Committee dedicated time to a hearing to investigate uncertainty in estate tax law, despite a plethora of more pressing fiscal issues facing the current Congress.

On Oct. 25, after a gestation period of nearly nine months, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) finally unveiled the Tax Reduction and Reform Act of 2007 (H.R. 3970), his self-described "mother of all tax bills." The Rangel bill is a $930 billion, multi-faceted tax reform package that seeks to abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) on a revenue-neutral basis. The measure redistributes the tax burden away from lower- and middle-class taxpayers and toward the wealthy beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.