Today is Tax Day, the day on which federal and state income tax filings are due for all Americans. The complexity of the tax code makes filing taxes a headache for most individuals, who have to root through the various deductions and credits they may be eligible for.

The government spends $1.3 trillion on various tax expenditures each year, enough to fill the entire deficit in President Obama’s latest budget proposal. And while some of the popular tax credits have real benefits for low- and middle-income Americans, the vast majority of the breaks go to the wealthy. In all, tax expenditures provide an extra quarter-million dollars a year for individuals in the top 1 percent of income-earners, according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers:

Even as many areas of government spending have been cut to the bone, our tax code remains larded up with expenditures that cost taxpayers $1.3 trillion every year. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the biggest tax expenditures apply to employer-provided health insurance, pension contributions and mortgages.

Popular as such tax breaks may be, they differ from typical government spending in that they give bigger subsidies to wealthier families. [...] Taken together, individual income tax expenditures are the equivalent of sending $686 each year to those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, $3,175 to those in the middle fifth, and $30,714 to those in the upper fifth. The average member of the top 1 percent gets nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year — a statistic that might have proved useful for the folks protesting in Zuccotti Park.

President Obama and Senate Democrats proposed the Buffett Rule, a minimum tax on millionaires, and fought to close other tax breaks that benefit the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, the budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and passed by House Republicans would supposedly pay for massive tax breaks for the wealthy by ending unspecified tax expenditures, but the GOP won’t explain which breaks they have in mind.

The GOP spent the last year making the case that the nation’s tax code unfairly benefits the low- and middle-income Americans, pushing the myth that half of Americans don’t pay any taxes. But as Stevens and Wolfers note, the fact that tax expenditures disproportionately benefit the top 1 percent makes it easy to “come to the mistaken conclusion that our tax code is more progressive than it actually is.”

The government programs that comprise America’s social safety net have had a profound effect on working families and the unemployed, particularly throughout the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery that has followed. But tax credits, which often go overlooked in discussions on how to prevent poverty, also have a huge impact on working families.

Many working families are now being led by single mothers or women who are primary breadwinners, and according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two primary tax credits are responsible for keeping millions of women and girls out of poverty each year. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which benefits low-income workers, kept an estimated 3.4 million women above the poverty line in 2010. Add in the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the number of women who avoided poverty swells to nearly 5 million, CBPP found:

The numbers rise when you include a second federal income tax credit — the less well-known CTC, which provides up to $1,000 per child for working families: together, the CTC and EITC kept 4.9 million women and girls above the poverty line in 2010, including more than 800,000 just by the Recovery Act’s expansions of both credits.

As CBPP’s Arloc Sherman noted, research shows that the EITC continues to help women even after they retire. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the EITC helps boost Social Security retirement benefits for women, since those benefits are based on prior income history.

Unfortunately, the newly-adopted House GOP budget could end many tax breaks in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich, though Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) refuses to say which breaks would be eliminated. If the GOP and Ryan continue their history of targeting programs that benefit the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich, however, beneficial tax credits like the EITC and CTC could be at risk.

The ethanol industry is one of many who wants to see special tax credits extended.

Politico’s Anna Palmer reports that K Street lobbyists are gearing up for a last-ditch effort to save a slew of “tax perks, credits and other goodies worth billions to industry.”

These special tax favors, encapsulated in a “tax extenders” package, have had little trouble passing in recent history. But this year “the price tag — about $30 billion over 10 years — makes them unpalatable when slashing spending is the agenda.” That’s why K Street’s lobbyists have mobilized themselves to defend these special tax breaks for industries such as real estate, energy, and automobiles. One lobbyist even likened passing the package of tax extenders to Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star:

“I’m working on several tax extenders, and we’re working our butts off,” said Holland & Knight’s Rich Gold, who gave the package a 1-in-10 chance of passing this year. “I’ve also been telling my clients it’s a little bit of Luke Skywalker threading the needle to get to the Death Star.”

While there may be merit to some of the tax policy contained within the tax extenders package (particularly the renewable energy production tax credit), most of these tailored tax credits and tax breaks are a result of lobbying by a handful of industries. They are a prime example of how special interests utilize K Street’s lobbyists to craft public policy for their own benefit.

Today, GOP presidential primary candidate former Gov. Buddy Roemer (LA) spoke at the National Press Club about how he is campaigning by taking on Big Money and special interests in Washington.

At one point, Roemer was asked what it would take for Congress to enact reform of our trade policies. Roemer explained that monied interests would try to block reforms he was proposing, like eliminating foreign tax credits and tax deductions for overseas business expenses:

QUESTION: What would it take to convince Congress to pass significant trade reform?

ROEMER: Cut off the big checks. GE doesn’t want trade reform, they want it the way it is. [...] I would do away with the deduction in the tax code, I think it’s section 162, which allows them to make a call center, for example, overseas and they deduct the expense from their American taxes. It oughta be changed. [...] Corporations are free to do what’s in their best interests. But I think it’s in their best interests for America to be strengthened. [...] There are ways to do it, I’ve mentioned two of them already, the deductability of expenses and the foreign tax credits.

By criticizing a tax code that incentivizes American firms to outsource jobs overseas, Roemer is taking an approach that is distinctly different from many of his GOP colleagues. Some candidates, like former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (GA), have even gone as far as to praise tax dodging by major corporations, saying that we should let them decide their own tax rates.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, online retailers across the country currently benefit from an “Amazon Tax Loophole,” which allows big online sellers like Amazon.com to avoid paying the same sales taxes as traditional retailers. This tax loophole is costly to state budgets. For example, in “2011 alone, Wisconsin will lose an estimated $127 million in uncollected sales tax on purchases made online.”

Lawmakers in California, which has cut more than $1 billion from the University of California and California State University systems to tackle deficits, moved to close this loophole yesterday. The California Assembly passed the final bill that would require online retailers to collect sales taxes just like traditional retailers:

The last of three bills aimed at getting the Seattle giant and other out-of-state online retailers to pay sales tax passed the Assembly on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s something we’ve been working on for years,” said Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who authored the bill. “But this is the first time that so many businesses up and down the state are supporting it.”

The passage of the legislation marks one of the first major victories for closing the online retailer loophole nationwide. Previously, the South Carolina Legislature was successfully bullied into approving the loophole, and Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) vetoed legislation that would’ve closed the loophole in his state. The California bills will now go to the state Senate, which previously passed a different version, and then the bills will be sent to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown (D). Amazon has previously threatened to cut all affiliate ties with the state if it closes the online sales tax loophole.