In the Washington Post today, Ruth Marcus recognizes that Bush is relying on a tax increase via the AMT to claim that he can balance the budget without raising taxes. Looked at another way, what the Bush tax cuts give to taxpayers, the AMT grabs back. By 2012, if it isn't changed, the AMT would take back almost one-third of the Bush tax cuts...it would take back more than half of the tax cut for people making between $100,000 and $200,000.

President Bush's FY 2008 budget proposal provides numerous projections calculated to prove the plausibility of his overall goal of eliminating the deficit budget by 2012 -- the only problem being the implausibility of the projections themselves. We have highlighted in our commentary on the budget and elsewhere some of the more conspicuously convenient calculations regarding war spending and AMT reform. CBPP expands upon the latter point in a paper released today, and relates it to a more plausibile assumption -- the extension of Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts -- arguing that

Check out these breakdowns of the President's budget:

• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• Center for American Progress
• National Priorities Project
• Coalition on Human Needs

President Bush's 2008 budget, to be released this morning, proposes to eliminate the deficit by 2012 with many spending cuts in various national health and well-being programs.

• $101.5 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over five years
• $223 million reduction in spending on the Children's Health Insurance Program, with cuts deep enough over five years to eliminate coverage for half of the children enrolled today
• $99 million savings by eliminating a childhood obesity prevention program