The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will meet with President Obama on the beaches of Normandy, France, tomorrow in commemoration of the 65th anniversary of D-Day. This happens while an expenses scandal rocks Brown's governing Labor Party as well as the other major British political parties. Joining The Takeaway is BBC's Political Correspondent Nick Childs from Westminster and Michael Goldfarb, London Correspondent of Globalpost.com.

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden released their 2008 tax returns last night. President Obama paid $855,323 in federal taxes on a combined household income of $2,656,902. In a press conference yesterday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs explained President Obama's hefty return as being due to his book royalties. More surprising perhaps is that Joe Biden appears to be the poorest Senator. Biden's tax return showed only $269,256 and paid $46,952 in federally taxes. Our man on Capitol Hill, Todd Zwillich, joins us with a look at the bounty of public disclosures yesterday.

Our partners The New York Times have all 67-pages of the Obamas' tax return. Click here.

It's Tax Day! In these challenging economic times, and in the wake of massive bank bailouts and several of Obama's cabinet nominees who took tax missteps, people may be fishing for an excuse not to pay all of their taxes. For a primer on what motivates us to cheat—and what keeps us honest—we are joined by behavioral economist Dan Ariely. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of Predictably Irrational.

For more Tax Day drama, check out our Producer's Note on the Battle of the Tax Day Tea Parties.

Tax Day: The battle of the tea parties.

The original tea party, of course, was in 1773, when colonists dumped chests of tea into the Boston Harbor to protest taxation by the British government. This year, dueling groups of disgruntled taxpayers are hurling their own real and metaphorical sacks of tea into the water to protest how they're being taxed.

"Taxed enough" tea parties

CNBC's Rick Santelli sort of, vaguely called for a tea party protest in February, when he said in the midst of a rant about bailing out homeowners, "We're thinking of having a Chicago tea party... I think we're going to be dumping in some derivative securities with that."

A group of people have organized what could be thousands of "tea party" protests around the country to protest government spending under the Obama administration, particularly stimulus spending. Joining the crew are former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in New York and conservative commentator Sean Hannity in Atlanta. Rick Santelli apparently won't be there. Protesters will hurl tea into the nearest body of water.

"No taxation without representation" tea parties

They'll either be smaller or they're less hyped, but dozens of protests are planned across the country to fight "the discrimination that same-sex couples continue to face... when they file their federal tax return form."

The protests are co-sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, Join the Impact, and Marriage Equality USA. Supporters of gay marriage will throw "symbolic federal tax forms into Boston Harbor" — but they'll pull them back out to avoid pollution.

Most Americans are drinking coffee...

Nearly half of Americans aren't very interested in tax protests anyway, according to a new Gallup Poll. The poll says that 48 percent of Americans say the amount of federal income taxes they pay is "about right." Americans haven't felt better about paying taxes in since 1956.

Most people are just going to try to get their taxes in (or file extensions) on time. For all of you who still file by mail, check your post office's hours. In many places across the country, post offices won't have extended hours because of budget cutbacks. If procrastinators could organize in a timely fashion, they'd probably have their own protest for more forgiving deadlines.

Tips, nostalgia and you

If you still haven't paid your taxes, here are some tips from the Associated Press.

If all that talk about the original Boston Tea Party has made you nostalgic, you can check out how the 1040 form has mutated over the years. It all looked a lot simpler in 1913.

And tell us what you think. If there were a comment box on the bottom of your tax forms, what would you want to tell the government about how paying taxes makes you feel this year? Call 1-877-8-MY-TAKE, email mytake@thetakeaway.org, or leave a comment below to let us know.

Good luck!

Tax season has arrived. As we’ve seen with several of President Obama’s administration nominees, paying taxes honestly and correctly is not the easiest thing to do. Kansas Governor and Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, Kathleen Sebelius, is the latest casualty. Do you pay your taxes honestly and correctly? Or is finding a tax loophole superseding baseball as the real national pastime? Mark Goulston, is a business psychologist and author of the book, Get Out of Your Own Way at Work … and Help Others Do the Same. He joins The Takeaway to help explain why it is just so hard to pay your taxes.

For more, read Sitara Nieves' Producer's Note on tax evasion, tax resistance and tax rebellion.

To help explain the tax basics, watch this video of a rapping Matthew Lesko.

Gandhi broke the law to oppose the salt tax. The early Americans railed against the tax on tea. From the first instance that taxes were levied, people have found ways to not pay, for reasons honorable, ideological, greedy and selfish.

Today, a new crop of people find new ways to oppose paying taxes. We talked on Friday with The New Republic's Jason Zengerle about "the tax honesty movement": people who creatively interpret the internal revenue code in various ways so they (argue they) don't have to pay taxes.

But those "tax honesty" folks are one small slice of tax scofflaws. The following aren't part of the "tax honesty movement" (for more on that, listen to the March 27 segment with Zengerle), but are some of my favorite people in the world of tax evasion, tax resistance and tax rebellion. Warning: With a few exceptions, most don't cut as sympathetic a figure as Gandhi.

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