D.C. Dispatch February 20, 2007

The alternative minimum tax is a nuisance, but the Bush administration is relying on it to balance the budget.

The Message in the Budget

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Needless to say, President's Bush's budget proposal for fiscal 2008 was dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. This is not a criticism, because instant pointlessness is almost a procedural requirement. But it does have implications. Don't ask whether the budget makes sense on its own terms. All one can intelligently ask about these Washington set pieces is whether they advance the discussion of what needs to be done and move the likely outcome in the right direction.

The budget did both, though that was probably not Bush's intention. With a tight grip on spending, the president tells us, the country can have his tax cuts, and then some, and still balance the books by 2012. This is so misleading that, for anybody paying attention, it isn't really misleading: It has the virtue of being fully incredible. Is there anybody in Washington who does not understand by now what keeps the deficit falling in the administration's projections? The answer, not counting the usual fixes, is the alternative minimum tax.

You will have heard of this, because the chances are you are either paying it or soon will be. Because of inflation and rising incomes, the number of households caught by the AMT is growing. If the president gets his way, it will grow much faster. Suppose the budget were passed as it stands and that the tax cuts of 2001 to '04 were made permanent. Then, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, the number of taxpayers caught by the AMT would rise from 3.5 million (4 percent of taxpayers) in 2006 to nearly 40 million (38 percent of taxpayers) in 2012. This massive expansion of the AMT's base is what brings the budget into balance, using the administration's own arithmetic.

True, the White House wants to halt the AMT's reach down the income scale. But the budget includes no long-term proposal to accomplish that. (The administration blandly calls for a "revenue-neutral" solution. But any revenue-neutral alternative to a widening AMT would, by definition, be just another tax increase.) In effect, the administration's outlying fiscal forecast assumes that AMT-creep will continue—and it takes full fiscal credit for this, even as Bush continues to proclaim his tax-cutting zeal. If your taxes go up because the AMT bites—which the White House is implicitly relying on—then that is a still a tax increase, isn't it? What am I missing here?

In short, even the White House is recognizing, albeit not very frankly, that higher taxes are going to be needed to balance the books. And that is the useful purpose that this budget serves. So far as the need for additional revenue is concerned, we are now, apparently, all on the same page.

Where ought we to find this revenue? One possibility might be to let the AMT crawl down the income scale until it has entirely taken over the tax code and the ordinary income tax can be repealed. You can make a case for this, in fact, since the AMT has some nice features, especially when you compare it with the ordinary tax code. But unless it is your intention to drive millions of taxpayers to the point of nervous breakdown, the prolonged transition would leave much to be desired.

When I lived in the United Kingdom, I imagined that American taxpayers had an easier time of things. They pay lower rates at the margin, or so I supposed, and they keep the Internal Revenue Service on a tighter leash than the Brits do with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs—so calculating one's taxes was bound to be simpler in the United States. Ho. Living in the District of Columbia, I face a higher consolidated marginal rate than I did in the U.K. and higher property taxes as well. (In return, of course, the government here supplies first-rate schools and world-class health care; but I digress.) That is nothing—nothing—compared with the distress induced by calculating my American taxes. The code is insanely complex, of course, as I now appreciate.

But the final capping absurdity, the insult that really lets you know where you stand, is to be told, after hours of grinding through the endless forms, to start over. No, you have not misunderstood, says the IRS: Please calculate your taxes a second time, on an entirely different basis, for AMT purposes. We are concerned that the figure we first thought of is not high enough. Simply compare the two and pay us the bigger sum. Oh, and if you have any suggestions about how we might streamline this process, pursuant to the Paperwork Reduction Act, which we take very seriously, be sure to drop us a line. America, I ask you, is this why you fought the Revolution?

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Clive Crook is a senior editor of The Atlantic and a columnist for National Journal. This column appears every other week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.