My column on nationaljournal.com this week explains why the debate is proving to be so difficult in spite of the fact that Congress is talking about providing a tax cut.

There are two basic problems.  The first is that the Republicans are complete schizophrenic on the issue.  The White House is insisting that an offsetting revenue  increase is not needed to pay for the $50 billion to $60 billion in lost revenues that would result, and congressional Republicans are insisting that the pay-as-you-go rules the Democrats committed to following which require an offset be followed.  The second problem is that the Democrats so far are trying to please everyone by doing both.

The column produced an almost immediate response from one reader.  In fact, in the more than 10 years I've been writing Budget Battles, this was the fastest reply I've ever received.  Here's the key part:

I think you miss the White House's most glaring inconsistencies on the AMT.   First, Bush's budget for every year since he took office assumed that he AMT will provide a gusher of revenues over the next decade.  This made he administration's deficit forecasts look smaller.   If they really elieved the AMT should never be collected, the budgets should have assumed
the revenue wouldn't be there -- just as his budgets assumed that the Bush ax cuts would be made permanent rather than expire at the end of 2010.

Second, and even more inconsistent:  Back in 2004, the president and reasury Secretary John Snow vowed to come up with a real solution to the AMT -- a permanent repeal in the context of a top-to-bottom reform.   What's important is that the president explicitly instructed his ax reform panel to come up with tax-overhaul proposals that would be REVENUE-NEUTRAL. In other words: eliminate the AMT, but make up for the lost revenue elsewhere.  That's EXACTLY what the Democrats are trying to do.
   

As it happened, the tax reform panel came up with two proposals, both f which would have eliminated the AMT and made up for the lost revenue lsewhere.  The Treasury Department promised to respond with its own proposals, as the president had ordered.  But that never happened. The administration quietly buried the whole effort, because it was too hard and the president was juggling too many other problems.   

Maybe it's not their fault -- tax reform is brutally difficult, no
question.  But for Bush to clobber Democrats for "increasing taxes,'' when Bush had been demanding exactly the same thing of his own tax-reform panel, is at the very least misleading.