The phones of House and Senate leaders are ringing off the hook right now, as CEOs and wealthy donors lobby them furiously to lower the top income tax rate and insert costly carve-outs into the GOP tax bill to protect their business tax preferences. Too bad regular taxpayers don’t have a direct line to the conferees hammering out the final bill to plead their cases. Because it seems as though they have been forgotten.
Case in point: At the last minute, Senate Republicans changed their version of the tax bill to keep the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) - a pernicious parallel tax code which they had promised to scrap that requires corporations and millions of individuals to calculate their taxes twice and pay whichever rate is higher.