Chuck Grassley: “I dispute the presumption we have to choose between AMT hold harmless and not extending capital gains and dividends. We…”

“I dispute the presumption we have to choose between AMT hold harmless and not extending capital gains and dividends. We can do both. The presumption in this bill is that we can and we are going to be able to do that in the conference committee. Since the amendment reflects the position of what we in the Senate previously had anticipated doing anyway, Members ought to vote for the amendment. I will vote for it. Yesterday afternoon, I took time to respond to Senator Harkin's statement that we have an AMT problem to a significant degree because of what the Finance Committee did in the 2001 tax bill. Importantly, he fails to recognize that we have addressed the problem for 2001 to 2005. And, now, we are trying to do the same thing for 2006--to make sure that the AMT problem is not worsened. To the extent that Senator Harkin suggests, like others who have looked at this issue, that the Bush tax cuts are responsible for the AMT problem, I respond in this way. Most who have reached that conclusion have done so by misusing data provided by the Joint Committee on Taxation, JCT, to distort the record on this issue. Additional analysis will demonstrate that conclusion to be erroneous. To the contrary, the analysis suggests an alternative explanation for the AMT problem--Congress's failure to index the AMT for inflation over the past 35 years. Senator Harkin suggests that the Bush tax cuts are responsible for the AMT problem.…”