With tax day looming, I’ll try to throw in more on the crazy world of tax policy — which usually means how corporations and rich people are taking us for a ride courtesy of very willing politicians. Today, it’s all about tax extenders.

What’s a tax extender. This is really hard: it’s a piece of legislation that…extends a tax break, almost always without much debate and almost always on behalf of corporations. And these tax extenders are a huge waste, as Citizens for Tax Justice points out:

It would be different if the tax breaks included in this legislation were helpful to the economy. But they are mostly wasteful subsidies for businesses with no obvious benefit to America.

The most costly provision among the “tax extenders” would extend the research credit. As a report from CTJ explains, this break is supposed to encourage companies to perform research but appears to subsidize activities that are not what any normal person would call research (like redesigning packaging for food). It also subsidizes activities that businesses would carry out in the absence of any tax break — including activities that businesses performed years before claiming the credit.

The third most costly provision among the tax extenders would extend the seemingly arcane “active financing exception,”which expands the ability of corporations to avoid taxes on their “offshore” profits and which General Electric publicly acknowledges as one of the ways it avoids federal taxes.

So bad.