The tax code is 5,296 pages long and full of complicated details. We outlined a few of them in our recent column for the New York Times Magazine. So why hasn't Congress done anything to simplify the tax code? We posed the question to Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the American Enterprise Institute. His response is below.

Prohibiting their bond trading will seriously weaken banks and the markets that banks supply with liquidity.

The U.S. is more active on trade policy than it has been in years.  President Obama is meeting with Canada and Mexico about new agreements, Congress will hold hearings on changing decades-old trade law, and the federal government will more broadly be bringing several cases before the WTO.

Yet, in constructing...

Competing currents will continue to push the state corporate income tax in opposite directions.Ultimately, the only certainty is that this tax will remain an active and hotly debated part of the state revenue landscape well into the future.

The authors consider capital inflows into the United States and the likely consequences of a simplification of the taxation of international transactions.

As required by the Dodd-Frank Act, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors have issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPR) to implement the "Living Will" requirements of Section 165(d).

Shifting from an income tax to a consumption tax could offer major simplification advantages. But could a consumption tax achieve the same progressivity as an income tax? Many people think not, but recent economic and legal research suggests that it can. Daniel Shaviro, a professor at the New York University...

Once again, high gasoline prices are in the news. As of this writing, the national average gasoline price per gallon price is hovering around $3.79.