In his 1997 tax deal with Congress, Bill Clinton helped add multiple new items to our tax forms, such as tax credits for children, deductions and credits for college expenses, a new flavor of IRAs, medical savings accounts, and more--along with a variety of eligibility rules and phase-outs. The IRS managed to squeeze all of these onto the 1040 form, but it'll be hard to make space for any more lines without resorting to obituary-size type and a magnifying glass.

The Bush Bear Market?

As soon as the U.S. Supreme Court chose George W. Bush as our next president, the stock market fell precipitously. Wall Street analysts who had been loudly insisting on the need for a Bush victory suddenly began to find all kinds of new reasons for the market's problems--poor corporate profits, weak consumer spending, energy price jumps, and high interest rates, among others. All plausible. But few analysts were willing to admit the obvious: Bush's plans to reverse the tight fiscal policies of the Clinton years with big upper-income tax cuts and hugely expensive privatization of Social Security have made Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve more reluctant to cut interest rates.