Threat to the middle class

Kansas City Star: President Bush and Congress need to quickly cut taxes on middle-income people who have been clobbered by the Alternative Minimum Tax. Washington should have acted on this long ago.
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 falls 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. Ideally, Washington should have fixed the main income tax. But the AMT was a reasonable second choice.
Unfortunately, inflation and misplaced political priorities have caused the AMT to creep down the income scale to the point where it hits or threatens millions of middle-class taxpayers. It could negate many of the tax cuts that the White House and Congress have promised in the last five years.
The original AMT was supposed to affect only two taxpayers in a million. Last year the Congressional Budget Office warned that it could affect a fifth of all taxpayers in another five years.
This is certainly more outrageous than many of the other tax problems that have drawn so much attention in Washington in recent years.
The answer is not to junk the entire AMT. That would unfairly benefit the super-wealthy at the expense of everyone else .