Entries for February 07, 2007

Ruth Marcus has a good column in today's Washington Post on the alternative minimum tax, which she calls "Bush's stealth tax increase." It's accompanied, in the print edition and online, with a table that shows the percentage of tax cuts taken back by the AMT. The biggest hit is taken by people in the $200,000-$500,000 range, who lose 74 percent, while the AMT takes back only 7 percent of the tax cuts of people with incomes over $1,000,000–presumably because the credits for college tuition and state and local taxes aren't worth much to people like Bill Gates. (I remember reading that one year he paid 1 percent of all U.S. income taxes.)