The Bush Plan: Tax Complification; the President's Cuts Push Us toward a Flat Rate and More Paperwork. (the Taxonomist)

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DOES GEORGE BUSH HAVE A SECRET PLAN TO IMPOSE A flat tax? I can't read his mind but one thing is clear: Unless the president's tax program adopted last year is amended, by the end of this decade most of the personal income tax revenue will come not from the regular, graduated-rate system but from the essentially flat rate, individual "alternative minimum tax."

This isn't supposed to be how the alternative tax--first adopted in 1969 to prevent wealthy people from sheltering all their income from tax--was supposed to work. As recently as 1999, only a million taxpayers, almost all of them very well off, actually paid the alternative tax, which added just $6.5 billion to federal revenues. But absent legislative change, by the time the Bush tax cuts are fully …