You may not have heard of the AMT - many haven't - but forget all those horrors that recently haunted Halloween movie and TV screens. AMT is the real thing - a monster that's about to eat you up. Well, a lot of you anyway.
The Alternative Minimum Tax is a great idea gone woefully wrong from neglect. It was enacted in 1969 to make sure the hyper rich, no matter how many dodgy tax lawyers and accountants they laid on, would pay at least something into the common coffers. Here, at last, was a tax that would still be there after every deduction and asset razzle-dazzle had been figured in.
Trouble is, creeping inflation has been slowly lowering the effective threshold. The AMT already snags 4 million upper-echelon taxpayers who were never intended for its grasp and 23 million upper-middle-class earners could fall prey next year if Congress doesn't intervene.
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