Smart bombs: Alternative universe

“That’s a tax raise … not over my dead body will they raise your taxes.” That was President Bush in 2002, addressing concerns that his 10-year tax cuts would be short-circuited by Democrats in Congress.

That’s not to say that Bush is averse to raising income taxes. In fact, the White House’s recent claim that the federal budget deficit will be wiped out by 2012 depends upon increased taxation of a rapidly growing number of households.

Welcome to the parallel universe known as the alternative minimum tax, a place where all of the tax breaks and rate reductions adopted by Congress and signed by the president in 2001 and 2003 do not exist.

Congress created this world 28 years ago because of publicity surrounding about 150 wealthy people who paid almost no income taxes because of the deductions and exemptions they were allowed to take. However, Congress did not index the AMT to inflation, so the number of households it ensnares has steadily increased.

The Congressional Budget Office notes that if the AMT isn’t fixed, one in five tax filers will be subjected to this higher tax by 2010. Left unchecked, half of all households will be hit by the AMT by 2017, including nearly 90 percent of families with at least two children and incomes between $75,000 and $100,000, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.

That’s a tax raise, and if it bothers our tax-cutting president, he sure has been quiet about it. Maybe it’s because he needs that extra revenue – an estimated $1 trillion over the next 10 years – to offset his tax cuts, most of which benefit the very people the AMT was designed to dun.

Spy vs. spy. According to a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, the Pentagon authorized an initiative by Douglas Feith, then-undersecretary of defense, to challenge the consensus reached by the intelligence community that there wasn’t a significant link between Iraq and al-Qaida.

Feith concluded that there was a “mature symbiotic relationship,” and that was the view peddled by the Bush administration in the run-up to the war. Is this important? Well, try to imagine the odds of the United States invading Iraq absent the events of Sept. 11.

Here’s how Feith defended his efforts in Friday’s Washington Post: “It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance.”

That’s how dumb they think we are.

Heh, I wonder who won? On Thursday, Slice columnist Paul Turner asked, “Should your DVR license be revoked?”

I’m sure the folks who hung around for the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl at my house would answer, “Yes!”

Thanks to the DVR’s pause function – and the general chattiness of my guests – we were about an hour behind live action. For the second half, we decided to zip through the commercials to catch up. But with the score at 22-17 in the fourth quarter, I hit the wrong button, and suddenly we were watching Peyton Manning accept the Lombardi Trophy.