'Alternative minimum' will hit with a wallop

Remember the waitress?

She's the gal President Bush kept alluding to every time he would pitch his $1.7 trillion tax-cut idea. Here's what Bush said in his own convoluted way back in 1991: "Under current law, say, a waitress is working hard to get ahead -- and she may have two children, earning $25,000 a year -- faces a higher marginal tax rate than a successful lawyer earning 10 times as much. That is not right."

If the lady still has a job in this topsy-turvy economy, she'll be saving about $200 in taxes.

Meanwhile, millions of middle-class families are getting saddled with a new tax that essentially lifts the burden off millionaires and socks it to Middle America. We're talking 36 million taxpayers, who will be forced to pay the "alternative minimum" tax by 2010 under the plan Congress passed last year.

The firefighter married to a teacher, the cop married to a legal secretary, the nurse married to a construction worker -- most all of them will be penalized under the new tax law if they have two or more kids. So much for compassionate conservatism.

Several economists warned this would happen, as did Democrats and a few fiscally conservative Republicans, too. They figured that Bush's tax cuts would bring back budget deficits and explode the debt. Bush argued otherwise. Now he blames the cost of the war on terrorism and congressional spending for the economy's woes and rising deficits.

Let's agree that the terrorist attacks hurt the nation's economic fortunes, as have the seemingly endless corporate scandals. The mammoth Bush tax cut still was so skewed to the richest Americans that it would be difficult to sustain even in a revved up economy.

And now a study by economists who have worked for Republicans and Democratic administrations, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, shows us what Bush's call for tax fairness really meant. The study prepared for the Tax Policy Center, a project of the moderate Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, warns that 97 percent of families earning $75,000 and up to $500,000 will get hit with the "alternative minimum" tax, which means they won't get as much as they were promised.