FTA: Senate Democrats gave up on "paygo," as it's called, when they realized they lacked the votes to offset the $50.6 billion cost of protecting more than 20 million middle-class taxpayers from getting whacked by the Alternative Minimum Tax this year. They've spent the year floating all kinds of tax increases to make up the difference. But in the end they passed an AMT relief bill without a penny to pay for it. Paygo is now pay gone.

And when he says "lacked the votes" what he means is, "unable to overcome Republican stonewalling". Everybody agrees that the Alternative Minimum Tax needs to be fixed, but for some reason the Republicans are celebrating because their stonewalling will sink the country further into debt. Do these Republicans not understand that our nation's debt is quickly turning into a national security issue? Do these Republicans not realize that our adversaries in the world possess a large chuck of our debt? Driving us further and further into debt for the cause of political brinkmanship is monumentally irresponsible.

mongbiohazard: The thing is... For many years now Congress has been cutting taxes a little here and there and revenues are going UP - not down - indicating that our taxes were too high and were restraining production

Productivity has been steadily increasing and thereby increasing tax revenue because of technological innovation, not because of some magical tax cutting voodoo. As technology has increased productivity, profits have increased; and they would have increased regardless of the level of taxes being paid by the richest consumers.

You can argue all you like that increased disposable income among the investment class allowed for this technologically driven increase in productivity, but you would still be wrong. Competition is the engine that has driven technological innovation, and taxes would not have changed the drive of competition in the marketplace to produce goods cheaper than the other guy.

Our flirtation with tax cuts has had many costs that people like yourself refuse to acknowledge. Our infrastructure has been decaying because there is not enough money to go around. Our currency has been on a rapid decline because for some farked up reason we have been spending more after cutting taxes. Finally the lure of specialized tax cuts has created a corporate welfare system within our nation, and has transformed lobbying from a hobby carried out by special interests into a multi Billion dollar graft scheme.

Its time it ends, we need to shift the AMT up to the $200,000 and above range, and place provisions in it to increase it based on inflation.