Prompted by Sen. Charles Grassley’s (R-IA) comments on Friday, I started digging into past political debates in LexisNexis about the AMT, and I came across this Washington Post article from May 27, 2001*. Written just a few days after the Senate passed its version of the $1.35 trillion 2001 Bush tax cuts, this excerpt indicates it was pretty clear then that the 2001 tax cuts had set up an AMT debacle that Congress will have to face in the coming years. Paradoxically, the tax cut will sharply increase the number of taxpayers subject to AMT because it will reduce their income tax liability below the point at which the surcharge kicks in. Without the tax measure approved yesterday, the number affected would rise to 17.5 million in 2010, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. But with the tax bill, the number reaches 35.5 million by that date. White House and congressional negotiators counted the AMT revenue from those taxpayers as a "give back" enabling them to keep the cost of the bill to the $1.35 trillion allowed by the Senate. (emphasis mine) So there you have it: President Bush and Congress specifically exacerbated the AMT problem to pass the 2001 tax cuts. *"Tax Cut May Have Short Run for Some; Other Provisions of Bill Curtail the Benefit" by Dan Morgan