Taxing family values

Most married-with-children Americans skip right past page 34 in the IRS tax booklet, the one regarding the alternative minimum tax. After all, AMT is for rich folks, a way to make them pay something resembling a fair share.

Skip no more. As the well-off dig ever deeper tax shelters, the burden of AMT falls with increasing weight upon the child rearers of the working class. During the next decade, AMT payments to the Treasury will grow 25-fold, to $1.2 billion. And that’s just from taxpayers in the already struggling $15,000-to-$30,000 range.

Congress enacted AMT in 1969 after it was embarassed by news reports that some 155 of the wealthiest Americans were deducting and exempting their way out of paying any federal income tax. A $40,000 cap on the amount that could be taken as business expenses was put in place and all was well.

At first, those who list their occupation as “investor” paid most of the freight. No longer could every drop of chablis or morsel of brie (or summer home, yacht or polo pony) be written off. AMT worked. The rich didn’t exactly get soaked, but at least they got a little damp.

Until 1986. That’s when Congress and President Reagan, determined to lower tax rates at a time of soaring budget deficits, decided that Americans were deducting too much. If tax credits for petroleum investments could be counted against the AMT cap, why not the cost of raising children and medical expenses?

Tax experts, including Treasury officials, warned that treating routine family life like drilling for oil eventually would turn AMT into a tax on the middle class, especially if the AMT was not indexed to inflation and if the wealthy were allowed to devise new tax dodges. In its 30 years on the books, the AMT cap has been raised once, by 12.5 percent to $45,000, but the cost of living has gone up 43 percent. So no indexing. As for preventing new dodges, more than 2,000 of the richest Americans paid no income taxes in 1997.

Congress tinkered with the AMT issue in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1977 and, as tinkering usually does, made it worse. Child care and education tax credits were counted against the AMT cap. The tax rate on capital gains (something people who need child care and education tax credits know nothing about) was lowered. Between now and 2008, the 1997 changes will save those in the $200,000-plus income group $796 million in AMT payments. They will cost those in the $50,000-to-$75,000 range $1.8 billion.

The poster parents for AMT are David and Margaret Klaasen of Marquette, Kan. They have an income of $89,000 a year. They also have 13 children, one with leukemia. On top of paying nearly $6,000 in regular income tax, their high child-rearing and medical deductions resulted in an additional AMT bill of $3,761. They are contesting it, claiming AMT is a tax on children, especially sick children.

But the Klaasens are an extreme case. Here’s some that aren’t: On the 1999 return, a married person making just $527 a week and filing separately will pay AMT; so will a single parent earning $50,000 a year and taking a child-care credit for two children.

Congress has been aware of the AMT crisis for years and has done nothing. Republicans are holding out for a total elimination of AMT; why, after all, give Middle America a break and not Upper America as well? Democrats know that a permanent fix, such as raising the cap to $57,000 (where it would be if it had been indexed to inflation) or exempting child care and education credits, would cost $4 billion. That’s a lot of pet projects to give up. Until the two sides come together, all the nation’s moms and dads can do is hold their children close and wonder why they didn’t have oil wells instead.