[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 6]
[House]
[Page 8998]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX REFORM

  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Today, 4 million Americans are paying the price for the misplaced tax 
priorities of the Bush administration and the Republicans here in 
Congress. For the last 6 years, their obsession with assisting the top 
\1/10\ of a percent and other favored special interests to reduce their 
tax burden has riddled the Tax Code with more loopholes, adding about a 
million and a half more words to that code. At the same time they have 
considered three mammoth and expensive tax bills in 2001, 2003 and 2004 
that refused to address the alternative minimum tax inequity. They have 
made few modest additions with broad benefit like the 10-percent 
bracket but showered their real attention, their affection, and huge 
sums of money on those who need help the least. In the process, the 
$5.6 trillion surplus inherited by this administration has evaporated, 
to be replaced by $2 trillion more in additional national debt.
  In the meantime, the alternative minimum tax, signed into law by 
Republican President Richard Nixon to ensure that the richest of 
Americans, who used tax shelters, pay at least some income tax, has 
morphed into a tax on millions of Americans who are caught because they 
pay their State and local taxes and are raising their families but 
largely leaves the most wealthy untouched.
  Without extraordinary action, over the course of the next 3 years the 
alternative minimum tax will ensnare 32 million families, virtually 
every two-worker middle-class family with children. It won't bother the 
hedge fund manager or the NBA superstar but it will tax the teacher 
married to the firefighter with two kids. Because a tax shelter now 
means paying your local property and income taxes but does not include 
the tremendous tax advantage from capital gains, it won't hit the high-
tech billionaire but will hit the postal worker and the nurse with 
three teenage kids at home.
  The zeal to make permanent these tax changes has left the needs of 
tens of millions of Americans at risk. Indeed, the number one priority 
of the administration and the Republicans in Congress for taxation 
would not only make a true reform of the alternative minimum tax 
prohibitively expensive, it would rely on the ever-widening reach of 
the alternative minimum tax to finance their schemes.
  On this day that millions of Americans are filing their tax returns 
and 4 million are paying the mutated, unfair alternative minimum tax, 
it is time to have that critical national debate on taxes in honest 
terms:
  Should we tax people who work at jobs more than people whose money 
works for them?
  Do we care about reducing the ability of some very privileged people 
to escape taxation?
  What is our priority for tax reform? Is it to freeze the patchwork of 
special interest provisions over the last 6 years? Or to prevent 32 
million families from an unjust alternative minimum tax, and then 
paying billions more to accountants just to calculate the damage?
  I would hope that this is the last year that this unjust tax is used 
to provide unnecessary tax benefits for those who need them the least 
at the expense of those truly in need of tax relief.

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