NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - With all the talk of President Bush's tax proposals this week, you might be wondering how to rearrange your portfolio so that you get the maximum benefit from the dividend tax cut.

A word of advice from the experts: Don't budge. Unless, that is, you enjoy raking leaves in the wind.

First, remember that shareholder taxes on dividends have not been eliminated. Bush simply proposed that they be. And second, even if the House and Senate do support the proposal, any final law may well take a different form than complete elimination.

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Observers anticipate much political wrangling over the proposal in the coming weeks, which is why certified financial planner Tom Grzymala urges investors to "sit tight and see what comes out the other end."

What's more, Bush's proposal, if passed into law, will introduce new layers of complexity when it comes to figuring out just how taxable your investments will be.

For example, not all dividends would be tax-exempt, only those offered by companies that have paid the federal taxes on their profits in full. But dividends (or a portion of the dividends) paid by companies that have exercised loopholes or posted losses would not be tax-exempt.

In addition, there's the "deemed dividend" wrinkle. Instead of paying a dividend to shareholders as cash, a company may reinvest the proceeds in the business. Shareholders would get to add this deemed dividend to their cost basis, eventually paying less in capital gains tax upon selling the stock.

"How are they going to keep track of it?...This is going to keep CPAs employed for their natural lives and beyond," Grzymala said.

And then there's the little matter of your IRA and your 401(k). A big advantage to such accounts is that dividends grow tax-deferred. If dividends are deemed tax-free, then that advantage is eliminated. Plus, you'll have to pay income tax on the dividends (as well the rest of your withdrawal) in your tax-deferred accounts when you take distributions at retirement.

Nevertheless, the long-term advantage of deductible, tax-deferred accounts over taxable ones will still be there -- after all, you'll still get an immediate tax break for your annual contributions, your employer may offer you a matching 401(k) contribution, and you'll still get the benefits of tax-deferred compounding, which is one of the best deals out there.

See the accompanying chart, which compares the growth of $10,000 in a 401(k) and its after-tax equivalent ($6,935 assuming a 31 percent tax rate). The 401(k) advantage is less under the Bush plan (because the taxable account does better), but still is sizeable.

In the case of a tax-deferred, non-deductible IRA (in which you may only contribute after-tax money), there's another consideration: The break-even point -- the point at which tax-deferred compounding makes up for the fact that you'll pay taxes on the distributions -- grows considerably. For example, the break-even point increases from 12 years to 19 years in a typical growth fund that returns 8 percent a year, according to T. Rowe Price.

If lawmakers don't change the way IRA and 401(k) withdrawals are taxed and the dividend tax elimination goes through, then investing in dividend-paying securities in a tax-deferred account might be as silly as investing in tax-free municipal bonds in that same tax-sheltered vehicle, said tax expert Martin Nissenbaum of Ernst & Young. (See table.)

When IRAs lose Watch what you invest in and where. Under the Bush plan, an equity-income fund that derives 30% of return from dividends would do better in a taxable account than in a non-deductible IRA. Years  Taxable (old law)  Taxable (Bush plan)  Non-deductible IRA  15  $24,047  $26,881  $25,064  20  $32,459  $37,668  $35,389  25  $43,913  $52,900  $50,559   *Growth of $10,000 investments, assuming 8% annual returns  Source: T. Rowe Price

Speaking of tax-exempt muni bonds, the elimination of the dividend tax would make the bonds' tax-free yield less rewarding in your taxable accounts if you can get an equally tax-free yield in the form of a dividend from a stock plus the potential for higher appreciation on that stock. On the other hand, there's always the risk a company will reduce or eliminate its dividend, tax-free or not, whereas the return on a muni bond -- while never entirely risk-free -- is less volatile.

In that case, you might split the difference and invest in the preferred stock of companies with high investment-grade credit ratings, Grzymala and Nissenbaum said. A preferred stock is a hybrid between a stock and a bond. The dividends from preferred shares are higher than they are for common shares and preferred stock shareholders get paid before common-stock shareholders in the event the company goes bankrupt. But preferred stocks, like bonds, are subject to interest-rate risk. When interest rates rise, the share price goes down.

Until the tax laws actually change and until certain key questions are answered, it will be hard for investors to strategically position themselves to profit from the changes.

Instead, Grzymala said, you might yield a far bigger dividend now by making sure your portfolio is well-diversified in accordance with your time horizon. Because, at the end of the day, the dividend tax proposal may become a much-watered down version of the original -- say, a 50 percent exclusion on your dividends -- or, as Grzymala said, "another little bump on the log."