Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) needs to be reformed.President Bush and Congress need to quickly cut taxes on middle-income people who have been clobbered by the alternative minimum tax.
The Alternative Minimum Tax should be used only for its original purpose: to ensure that those at the absolute top of the income scale pay their fair share in income taxes.
The Republican party prides itself on tax relief, tax simplification and tax fairness. Reform of the AMT laws fall into all three categories. That's why the GOP's failure in recent years to focus on this obviously needed reform has been so disappointing.
The AMT was created in 1969 to plug gaps in the main tax system that allowed extremely wealthy persons to pay little or nothing.
Unfortunately, inflation and misplaced political priorities have caused AMT to creep down the income scale to the point where it either hits or threatens millions of middle-class taxpayers, in fact, it could negate many of the tax cuts that the White House and Congress have promised in the last five years.
The answer is not to junk the entire AMT. That would unfairly benefit the super wealthy at the expense of everyone else- unless it was done as part of broader reform of the entire income tax code.
If President and Congress can't deliver that broad reform, they should simply cut the AMT burden on the middle-class taxpayers.
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