Treadwell & the Alternative Minimum Tax

Alexander "Sandy" Treadwell writes in the Friday Adirondack Daily Enterprise that Congress is too partisan. Mr. Treadwell thinks the way to change such partisanship is to elect him, a Republican, to replace Democrat Rep. Gillibrand to represent NY 20.

In the coming months, the members of the 110th Congress must end the partisan rancor and return civility to Congress. Nobody, of course, should expect real debate to occur without conflict and disagreement on how to solve our nation’s problems. But when that conflict occurs, we should be mindful of the words of Gerald Ford, a man who served in the House and as our president during difficult times and often said, “We can disagree without being disagreeable.”

He uses the alternative minimum tax as one example.

Another critical step that Congress should take this year is fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax once and for all.

I wonder why the alternative minimum tax hasn't been fixed thus far? Surely, it can't be because Republicans in the Senate refuse to vote for changing the AMT?

The vote was 46-48, 14 short of the 60 votes needed to began debate on the bill the House passed last month. Every voting Republican opposed proceeding.

In the House of Representatives the Republicans want to do away with the AMT. This means a loss of over $800 billion in tax revenue and Republicans do not want to raise taxes to recover that revenue. It's not enough that the last six years of Republican rule has increased the US debt from 5.6 trillion to over 9 trillion dollars. Democrats may be the party of tax and spend (although Democrats did leave a budget surplus in 2000) but Republicans have become the party of borrow and spend.

Mr. Treadwell also tells us that Congress must do more about the US addiction to Foreign oil.

Congress also must do more over the coming year to break our nation’s addiction to foreign oil by giving Americans control of our energy. Our economy is currently at the mercy of foreign nations whose leaders despise our way of life and use their vast control of oil reserves to harm us.

Can't argue with that statement. Mr. Treadwell proposes to "development of a robust domestic energy industry, including wind, solar and nuclear power as well as other forms of alternative energy like cellulosic ethanol" to solve the problem. But I'm pretty sure that, like most Republicans, he would surely go along with just looking and drilling for more oil.

Now to address the partisanship. Which party has had control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for most of the past seven years. Hint: it wasn't the Democrats. The Bush administration with it's Republican-controlled Congress was built on partisanship. Replacing Democrat Gillibrand with Republican Treadwell is supposed to make things more bipartisan. I doubt it.