Political Quotes

“And this is something that's critical to understanding the tax policies that we're going to be considering in the remaining time that we have in the 110th Congress. The alternative minimum tax, as the gentleman is pointing out, is something that has to be addressed. We simply cannot afford to ignore this issue any longer. We've been in a position where we have been giving 1-year fixes year after year. For 1 year we hold harmless the folks that should qualify for the AMT as it's currently written with that flawed formula, and we push it off another year, and it gets more expensive to fix every time we do that. And what the gentleman from Connecticut is talking about is it was a flaw. In 1969, they created the alternative minimum tax to prevent people from escaping their tax obligations. They couldn't use deductions and loopholes and whatnot, and they didn't index it for inflation. So now we're 38 years later, and the income of 1969 that was considered rich at that point, due to 38 years of inflation, we have a different outlook on that. So we have a situation where the alternative minimum tax is spiraling out of control. And you gave numbers, 4 million people affected by it this year. If we do nothing, it is going to be 23 million next year. So we can't ignore the problem, and our friends on the other side of the aisle can pretend like that's not part of the equation and this is not something that we have to deal with or this isn't going to have a cost.”