So, Okay. I know this is a boring topic, but for those of us living in New York City, with its city + state income tax of up to nearly 10%, the AMT is a very real problem. The AMT was designed in 1969 to prevent the very rich from spinning off large deductions which could be used to offset their ordinary income and reduce their otherwise large personal income tax bills. There are any number of expenses that are deductible, as anyone who has filed a return knows, and one of them is local/state taxes. Many people here in New York have begun to get hit with the AMT, often costing thousands of extra dollars in taxes. The reason more and more people are forced to pay the AMT is that it was never indexed for inflation, so that as incomes (and deductions, for things like state/local taxes) go up, the nearer the AMT ceiling comes. Why is this important?
The reason it's important is that today, the House of Representatives passed legislation that puts a patch on the AMT for one year, so that the issues can be fully debated during the presidential election, and so that the AMT doesn't ensnare more of the middle and upper middle class in this country, for whom the AMT was never supposed to affect. The vote in the House of representatives was 216-193. CNN has the details: here. Guess who, among those never to vote for a tax increase, voted against this imminently reasonable measure. If you said every single republican voter, you were correct.
To suggest that this party is about cutting taxes and being in favor of the middle class is garbage. This should be hung around their necks every day until the first Tuesday in November of 2008.