Seven weeks from Monday, the Alternative Minimum Tax comes back with its lower thresholds: $33,750 for singles and $45,000 for families.
http://www.ncpa.org/...
This amounts to a significant tax hike, created by the Repbulicans, squarely on the Middle Class.
Yet the Democrats aren't even making a peep about it.
If the DEMOCRATS designed a surreptitious tax hike to land on the same middle class, the REPUBLICANS would be all over the airwaves about it.
But right now, the silence out of the Dems is deafening.
Remember: By the Republican rule book, if you let a tax BREAK expire, it is the moral equivalent of a tax HIKE. They have been saying this for all those Bush tax cuts, that, even where AMT does not destroy them, were temporary anyway.
How can the return of the Estate Tax in 2011 be a "tax hike", but this re-imposing of AMT at low earnings not ALSO be a tax hike?
It's time for the Democrats to start floating this issue ahead of when the tax bills would be due (April 2008). By then, it will look like the Democrats put the tax on, not the GOP who've been running things on the Hill for most all of the last 12 years.
Don't study fixing the AMT, just get a sizeable repeal going. Give Bush three or four "revenue enhancers" that he can use to pay for the fix.
Tell Bush, his '01 and '03 cuts really aren't real, if the AMT takes them back. Just like his "mission accomplished" victory in Iraq.