Last fall, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel introduced major tax legislation (H.R. 3970) that would repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax and finance repeal by imposing an income tax surcharge on high-income households. The package also includes expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, refundable Child Tax Credit, and standard deduction and a reduction in the corporate income tax rate, financed by reforms to the corporate income tax.
This analysis focuses on the bill’s AMT proposal. That proposal meets the key criteria for tax reform: it eliminates a feature of the current tax code that suffers from a number of problems and replaces the lost revenue in a way that is simpler, more progressive, and probably more economically efficient.
Republican congressional leaders have sharply attacked the Rangel plan as a massive tax increase that would seriously damage, or even “doom,” the U.S. economy. This response should arouse concern from members of both political parties who envision someday enacting bipartisan tax reform legislation that, like the 1986 Tax Reform Act, is revenue neutral. If any legislation that lowers some taxes and raises others to compensate is vilified as a “tax increase,” fiscally responsible tax reform will become all but impossible.
The Rangel AMT plan should be evaluated on basic tax-reform criteria. That is, it should be compared with current law and alternative proposals on such measures as revenue adequacy, equity, efficiency, and simplicity. This analysis finds that the Rangel bill scores high relative to both the existing AMT and the most frequently discussed alternative approach to AMT reform: repealing the AMT without paying for it.[1]
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