One of my favorite bloggers at the moment is Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute. I’m not sure Gleckman considers himself a liberal or a centrist, but he’s fantastic, fair-minded, and very, very smart. In a post on the dueling job tax credit proposals, Gleckman concludes that the Obama administration plan is better than the Schumer-Hatch alternative. After finding Schumer-Hatch intriguing, I think he’s right that the White House has a better plan — but I’m even more convinced that the jobs tax credit idea, in any politically imaginable form, is a bad one.

Another Gleckman post points me to a Ryan response to critics who’ve suggested that his revenue projections are too rosy. My respect for Gleckman and Ryan keeps growing. The last section, on the resemblance between the Ryan tax plan and Fred Thompson’s plan from his short-lived 2008 presidential campaign, is particularly eye-opening.