Happy Tax Day?

In celebrating everyone’s least favorite, forced federal holiday, let’s take a look at what makes our tax code so… special.

It’s lengthy.
Today’s tax code contains almost four million words.

It’s time consuming.
Individuals and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours a year on tax filings. For individuals, the estimated average time burden for all taxpayers filing a Form 1040, 1040A, or 1040EZ is 13 hours.

It’s expensive.
Tax compliance costs are 65% higher for small businesses than big businesses, costing small-business owners $18-$19 billion per year. Paperwork alone comes to $72.24 per hour.  For larger, corporate-tax payers, America’s is the highest in the world.

It’s wasteful.
U.S. taxpayers pay $431.1 billion annually in compliance costs, known as “the complexity tax.”

It’s complicated.
There are over 800 currently active tax forms. And to figure these forms out, America has 1.2 million paid tax preparers in the United States. That’s more than law enforcement officers and professional firefighters combined.

It’s unfair.
The percentage of Americans who think their income taxes are fair is at its lowest since 2001. The “tax gap” –the amount of taxes due but not paid—is approximately $400 billion per year.

Share your least favorite part of the tax code:

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Tom DeLay, Hoping to Overturn Convictions, Is Not Happy With One of His Judges

Tom DeLay can be hard to like.

Mr. DeLay, the former House majority leader, seems to see everything through a partisan lens. He says remarkably caustic things about his foes. When you think it might be a good time for him to be humble, he puts on a matador outfit and dances across your TV screen.

But put that aside if you’re able.

He goes to court soon in Austin, hoping to overturn his convictions for laundering campaign finances and for conspiring to launder that money, and thus to get out of a three-year prison term that hasn’t started yet. Another count drew him a sentence of five years of community supervision. He was convicted of trying to swap illegal corporate contributions for legal contributions that could be used in Texas legislative races.

The state’s Third Court of Appeals, a six-judge outfit made up of four Republicans and two Democrats, will hear his case soon (a hearing set for Wednesday was canceled). Mr. DeLay wants one of those Democrats — Judge Diane Henson of Austin — off the panel.

She appeared, as candidates will, on the stage of the Democratic State Convention in 2006, preaching fire and brimstone, as candidates do. Mr. DeLay had a special place with the Texas Democratic Party at the time, kind of like the status Nancy Pelosi has with the national Republican Party.

He was their Voldemort.

For a shining moment, he seemed to be in the first line of every Democratic fund-raising letter, the force against which the Democrats could raise their money and rally their supporters.

That was the context for Judge Henson’s speech to the Democrats in 2006. Here’s how she started: “My name is Diane Henson. I’m running for Place 3 on the Third Court of Appeals, which is the court that sits in Austin next to the State Capitol. It is the court of appeals that would hear the appeal of Tom DeLay, if by chance he was convicted.”

Well, he was. And it is. And by the luck of the draw and the tuck of the tail, she is one of the three judges on the panel that is supposed to hear his appeal.

She wasn’t supposed to be on the panel. But one judge recused himself — he didn’t say why, and he doesn’t have to — and another asked to be removed. Both, incidentally, are Republicans who are up for re-election this year. One of their replacements then recused himself, leaving a pool of just three judges from which to choose a three-judge panel.

One of the three is Judge Henson. That’s like discovering that someone on the “Dancing With the Stars” panel doesn’t like sequins.

Mr. DeLay’s lawyer, Brian Wice of Houston, suggested in a letter to the Court of Appeals that Judge Henson, given her comments, might want to recuse herself. When that didn’t change anything, he filed a formal motion with the court asking that she recuse herself because “a reasonable member of the public would harbor doubts that Judge Henson was impartial.”

He’s asking that the full court meet to decide the matter and he suggests that the Texas Supreme Court appoint a replacement if too many of the appeals court’s judges have the sniffles — or conflicts of interest.

The court isn’t obligated to make any changes. Mr. Wice could, in his words, be “stuck like Chuck” here. He said (remember who the client is and what his arguments have been throughout the history of the case) that if Judge Henson hears the case, there would always be an asterisk next to the decision. “This case is only about politics,” he said. “That’s all it’s ever been about.”

You don’t have to buy that or believe that Judge Henson is anything other than a fair-minded judge with the ability to look at Mr. DeLay’s case the same way she’d look at anything else.

But appearances matter. What judges do is largely done quietly and outside the view of the public. Save the argument about whether we should be holding partisan judicial elections at all.

This is a trust thing, and they have to act as if this is a fair question: How would this look different if she was biased against Mr. DeLay and acted on her bias?

Just because he can be irritating doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

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AP-GfK Poll: Most Republicans happy with GOP field (AP)

By KASIE HUNT and JENNIFER AGIESTA, Associated Press Kasie Hunt And Jennifer Agiesta, Associated Press – 2 hrs 47 mins ago

WASHINGTON – After grousing for months, Republicans are growing more satisfied with their choices for president and, so far, they like what they're hearing from the newest candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

An Associated Press-GfK poll released Friday found that two-thirds of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents are pleased with the party's presidential field, compared with just half in June. And they're paying more attention, with 52 percent expressing a "great deal" of interest in the GOP nomination fight — compared with 39 percent earlier this summer — after a period that saw Perry enter the race and Michele Bachmann win a test vote in Iowa, the lead-off caucus state, threatening Mitt Romney's standing at the top of the pack.

The poll shows Perry — who has never run a national campaign and is just now introducing himself to most people — benefiting from wall-to-wall news coverage over the past few weeks as he became a candidate and jostled the until-then sleepy contest. Just 12 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents have a negative impression of the Texas governor. And 63 percent of Republicans view him in a positive light, compared with 33 percent in June.

Beyond that, Republicans didn't change their impressions much about Romney. Nearly 2 in 3 still view the former Massachusetts governor positively, while just under a quarter view him negatively as he runs a cautious, methodical campaign that's facing its first true test in Perry.

Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who won the Iowa straw poll, got roughly the same marks as Romney now that she's boosted her national profile. Both her positive and negative ratings rose in the two months since she entered the contest and started to become better known.

Broadly, the results suggest that Republicans are coming around to the idea that there may be a winner in the bunch after being less than enthusiastic for months and even though party elders continue to grouse that the field lacks a candidate strong enough to take on President Barack Obama. As recently as this week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — again — insisted they weren't running for president despite urging from supporters.

Sarah Palin, the GOP's 2008 vice presidential nominee, says she'll announce in late September whether she will run.

Stay-at-home mom Jennifer Bevington of Toledo, Ohio, is among those Republicans who like what they see, saying: "Out of the top three — Michele Bachmann, Perry and Romney — of who's running, they should be able to come up with a good candidate."

Mary Parish of Troy, Tenn., had doubted for months that any of the candidates in the field were strong enough to run the country or topple Obama. Now, the retired convenience store manager says: "I like Rick Perry. I think he's a Christian, a good Christian person. I like what he stands for, and I think he's strong enough to beat Obama."

Still, while Republicans like them are warming up to the field, the overall population still has significant doubts and is largely unimpressed, which could bode well for Obama come the general election.

Just 41 percent of all those surveyed expressed satisfaction with the official and unofficial GOP candidates, about the same as in June, and only Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor toying with a candidacy, get significantly higher favorable marks than unfavorable ones among certain or possible presidential contenders. And no Republican candidate — declared or otherwise — is viewed favorably by a majority of people.

This GOP field has been remarkably slow to form as Republicans look to challenge a politically vulnerable Democratic incumbent saddled with high unemployment, rampant foreclosures and soaring debt.

Now, five months before the Republican nomination contests are to begin, the field is largely set with Romney, Perry and Bachmann clustered near the top of many surveys, followed by Texas Rep. Ron Paul. Nearly everyone else is languishing far behind, including former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former pizza executive Herman Cain and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

The poll also found:

_Among Republicans who back the tea party, 80 percent view Bachmann favorably while 74 percent see Perry positively. Among those Republicans who don't back the coalition, just 37 percent have positive impressions of Bachmann and 48 percent of Perry.

_Romney earns positive reviews from a broader group of Republicans than Bachmann or Perry do. Majorities of both conservative and more liberal Republicans hold favorable views of him, which suggests he may be able to stitch together a broader coalition of supporters than his rivals to win the GOP nomination.

_Negative impressions of Romney among all adults grew 6 percentage points, topping 4 in 10 for the first time in AP-GfK polling. That's a warning sign for Romney as he executes a strategy to run a general election campaign focused on Obama and the economy while appealing to a broad spectrum of voters.

_Huntsman's negative rankings crept upward during the first few months of his campaign, and he was the only GOP candidate viewed unfavorably by as many Republicans as view him positively.

The poll was conducted Aug. 18-22 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellular telephone interviews with 1,000 adults nationwide and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. The poll included interviews with 408 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents; the margin of error for these results is plus or minus 6.4 percentage points.

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Poll results: http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com

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Associated Press writers Ken Thomas and Stacy A. Anderson and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

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