A proposed gas tax led to some red faces at the White House earlier this week. Ray LaHood -- the only Republican in the Obama administration -- suggested it, perhaps in an effort to put the 'tax' back in 'tax-and-spend'. To the average driver, paying for something you used to get for free sounds like a bad deal. Five reasons it's actually a great bargain instead: 1) The 'fringe benefits' are fantastic: part of the mileage-tax plan requires installing a global network of GPS-based car-tracking systems. There are privacy concerns, of course, and those will need to be addressed. But this plan also makes it possible to do some amazing things. From dynamic traffic maps criminal detection, this would allow the government to start many other programs. And if private companies could use the information (again, privacy is a major roadblock), they'd be able to come up with even more great uses. 2) Smug hybrid owners will have to pay their fair share: I know, I know, playing politics means playing dirty. But surely we can all agree that if gas taxes pay to fix up roads, Prius owners are getting away with highway robbery. 3) Gas-guzzling SUV drivers will still pay up, too: ...

Via TaxProf, I found this article suggesting that we audit all high-ranking politicians political figures. Not to be vindictive -- or not just, anyway -- but because people take cues from politicians on how to behave, and incidents like the Daschle tax affair make people less likely to take taxes seriously. This doesn't just have the obvious effect of streamlining the nomination process by digging dirt in advance. And it's also not just a way to keep politicians honest about the favors they're getting from -- and doing for -- their friends. Nope, it's actually based on a legitimate study, which showed that people cheat less on their taxes when they think others cheat less, too. The great thing about a proposal like this is that it would be so hard for anyone to honestly object. The version suggested in the link actually requires that we not release the results to the public. Instead, people would just be informed if their representatives ahd over- or under-paid. Granted, this is a one-shot deal. If regular audits became more common, a few crooks would shape up, and the rest would just try to be a little more subtle. But in the meantime, it would create the ...

As tax season rolls around for most of us, some folks are nervously remembering April 15ths past, when that tax due date crept up and sprinted past. Fortunately, the IRS is not exactly averse to getting their money, even if it comes a little late. And you don't even have to go through their standard-issue rigamarole, either: over the last few years, plenty of online tax providers have appeared on the scene to help make filing late taxes easy! Here are a few of the top players: TurboTax -- Best known for their plain-vanilla tax software, TurboTax is willing to accomodate taxpayers who missed their deadlines. If you already use TurboTax, it can be a solid choice -- but their late-tax features tend to be bolted on after the fact. TurboTax is tax-paying software that happens to allow late filing, not anything specifically good at that particular issue. PriorTax -- Definitely best of the bunch. PriorTax is a service specifically designed for people who need to pay their taxes late, so every time you use the site, you're using it exactly the way the designers intended. In addition to a great array of tax-filing services, the site has a full glossary and a ...

In the wake of the Madoff scandal, some people have discussed how "fraudulent conveyance" could be a major issue. The doctrine of fraudulent conveyance basically holds that after a fraud, someone who benefited should give up some (or all) of their benefits to those who were wronged, even if they had no idea what was going on. It's a usful doctrine in a lot of cases -- if Madoff, for example, had given his sons tens of millions of dollars but left others high and dry, it wouldn't be a great plan to let them keep the money. But what people don't often mention is the big problem with fraudulent conveyance: it encourages people to look the other way when they suspect that they've accidentally invested in a Ponzi scheme. Imagine a Madoff investor who realizes that Bernie has been lying, and is billions of dollars short of what he said he'd earned. The investor has two basic 'exit strategies': to hope that Madoff makes back the money he said he had, or to pull out money now. But pulling out money makes it harder for Madoff to make it back! If Bernie has $5 billion, and says he has $10 billion, ...