The Cost of the Tax Bill: Do We Count Fairly?

Senior Fellow Eugene Steuerle considers 1999 tax proposals, and concludes that current law sets a baseline that can be misleading when measuring the costs of a tax bill. A different baseline would yield a very different perception of when the tax bill was costing revenues and when it was not. In the current tax bill, perhaps the most misleading of all is the long-term revenue loss pegged onto the AMT changes that mainly prevent it from taxing at a level never intended in the first place.