Chuck Grassley: “lately we have heard a lot about the alternative minimum tax and the difficulties involved in fixing it. Right now is…”

“lately we have heard a lot about the alternative minimum tax and the difficulties involved in fixing it. Right now is tax time so a lot of people are going through the process of determining whether they owe the alternative minimum tax. I will visit with taxpayers about that. At another time I will go into greater detail regarding some of these problems and what we need to do to fix the alternative minimum tax. Right now I want to explain how we got into this situation. Of course, as with anything, it would be foolish to go forward on this issue without looking back to see how we got to where we are now, after 40 years of the alternative minimum tax. The alternative minimum tax, then, obviously has been with us for that long a period of time. The individual minimum tax was the original name of the alternative minimum tax and was enacted first in 1969. This chart I am displaying highlights a few of the important and most recent milestones in the evolution of the AMT. I will not go into each of those milestones in detail, but by looking at the chart you can see the AMT has not been a constant. There has been an alternative minimum tax, but it has had some changes in the last 38 years. First, the history of the AMT. In the 1960s, Congress discovered only 155 taxpayers--all people with incomes greater than $200,000 a year-- were not paying any taxes whatever.”