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1 Patrick Fleenor, Fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax 1 (2007)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/srbffxz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: May 2007                 .t                                                        t
No. 155
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By                      1. Introduction                             the untaxed income. To minimize taxes,
Patrick WFkeenortt
Chief co n o m ist      In the tax returns Americans finished filing a p
Tax Foundation          month ago, the federal government collected  prodcie sandn the  ecoopmy lessprseo.An
tax on less than 40 percent of personal in-  effcieandso e people yacess ansderos.in
come.' The rest went untaxed, and only a   baueris omoleunaciencthanin
small fraction of that was due to illegal tax eva-  arehernira on a losyseu teicoem.a
sion. Most income that escaped taxation did so  ohrufi aaini      ytmcpolm
in perfectly legal ways, through exclusions, de-  Of course, there are people who think th.
ductions, exemptions and credits that Congress  uneven application of high tax rates is fair: th
has written into our income tax code over  very beneficiaries of those tax breaks. They b(
many years.                                lieve their income is special, more important
The three main effects of all these special  or more virtuous. Once they secure a special
tax reas ae hghe ta rats, conmicinefi-tax break through political action, these ben-
ciency and unfairness. The rates have to be efcaishvapresenetveofvr
higher tax rates on everyone else because that
St              t                  makes their special provision more valuable.