This just in, per today's CongressDaily ($): House Ways and Means Chairman Rangel said this afternoon he would move to break the House-Senate stalemate over minimum wage legislation by marking up a small business tax bill next Monday [which] he expects it to be "in the vicinity of $1 billion." It will also include about $1 billion in offsets to make it revenue neutral. Rangel insisted for weeks on passage of a "clean" minimum wage bill -- one containing no tax breaks. Today, Rangel insisted that he will not let his arm be twisted in conference negotiations over the size of the tax package.

House Ways and Means Committee chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) has dropped subtle hints before, as we have noted, that he would consider a compromise on the $8.3 billion tax cut package the Senate attached to the minimum wage bill it passed last week. But speaking to reporters yesterday, Rangel now says he is "prepared to send something over there for [the Senate] to be able to attach a tax package" for the sake of getting the bill to the President's desk.

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