Joel Slemrod (Michigan, Business & Economics) & Jon Bakija (Williams College, Economics) have published Taxing Ourselves: A Citizen’s Guide to the Debate over Taxes (MIT Press, 3rd ed. 2004).  Here is the publisher’s description:

To follow the debate over tax reform, the interested citizen is forced to choose between misleading sound bites and academic treatises. Taxing Ourselves bridges the gap between the two by presenting in clear nontechnical language the key issues in tax reform: who should pay taxes, how taxes affect the economy, and whether to reform or replace the current tax system. The authors discuss various alternative proposals in detail, including the flat tax and the sales tax, but they are not advocates for any of them; instead, they provide readers with the knowledge and the tools — including an informative overview of the U.S. tax system and an invaluable voter’s guide to the tax policy debate — to make their own informed choices about how we should tax ourselves.