In plain English, if you're in the middle class, it's likely you have been paying only your regular income tax, but in a few years you'll find yourself paying not just that but also an increasingly hefty AMT. (Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 gave very short-term fixes to this problem. But those short-term fixes expire at the end of 2005, after which the AMT will increasingly become a burden on the middle class.)

Now here is an especially devious aspect of the Republican plot. Republicans did not show the interest in a long-term fix for the AMT in 2001 that they showed for slashing the estate tax, or in 2003 for chopping the tax on corporate dividends. After all, those are taxes that irritate very wealthy Republicans. By contrast, it so happens that the AMT's rise creates a much bigger problem for Democrats than Republicans. The states and localities that levy income taxes tend to be more Democratic, like California and New York, than the states that do not, like Texas. So that's where the taxpayers are whose income tax, but not their AMT, is reduced by deducting state and local income taxes -- and who will find themselves paying lots of AMT in a second Bush term. Thus the AMT performs the politically dangerous trick of surcharging Democratic areas and sparing Republican ones.

In fact, the partisan effect of leaving the AMT without a long-term fix is so potent that an article in the tax journal Tax Notes during the passage of Bush's 2001 tax bill had the stark headline, based on the AMT's long-term effect, "No Tax Cuts for the Gore States." Change "Gore" to "Kerry" or just plain "Democratic" and the post-2005 prospect becomes alarmingly clear.

In order to close the jaws of this political trap, in 2005-06 a Republican Congress and president will repeatedly and visibly put congressional Democrats to the politically lethal dilemma of having to vote on a package that patches the AMT and slashes the EITC. How would this work politically for the Republicans? Abolishing the AMT would cost $85 billion, and could be matched by a repeal of low-income tax credits, principally the EITC, thereby imposing $74 billion in taxes on the working poor, according to Olson. Forced to vote on such a package, some Democratic members may vote in favor of the measure to avoid the wrath of their own states and districts that otherwise face an increasing share of the federal tax burden as the AMT increases for them. But such votes to slash the EITC would then turn off the party's base among the working poor.

Thereafter, near election time, the Republicans would spend heavily on easily understood, oversimplified negative advertising to label the Democrats, whichever way they vote, as tax increasers for either their geographic or economic bases. Meanwhile, Bush could use whatever funds, such as even more piled-on debt, he wishes to devote to more regressive tax cuts, for those measures -- like repealing estate tax for estates of unlimited size -- which, unlike cutting the AMT or maintaining the EITC, put money in bulging pockets of his own high-income constituency.

The basic pattern is clear. The 2004 Republican platform and the program for a second term provide the blueprint for long-term Republican entrenchment in office. Bush intends to split the Democratic coalition by devastating the social gains the nation has created to guard against the worst effects of economic downturns, gross inequalities and the health vulnerabilities of the old.

Some observers may comfort themselves with the reassurance of a pendulum theory of government, in which even if Bush wins and presides over a unified Republican government, he may still have no popular mandate to pursue such a program. In this complacent view, the pendulum may have swung right at the present, but it must swing back, not onward even further toward the far right. But Bush and Karl Rove have proved they do not passively await popular mandates or pendulum swings. They have already done much of the preparatory work for their radical plans in the past four years. The Medicare revision, for example, already provides all the legal authority Bush needs; it only requires a tough-on-beneficiaries approach by those under his command who make the Medicare rules.

Bush stands on the threshold of his great dream -- or our nightmare -- of a nation in which key former Democratic coalitions lose large and important groups that have an investment in a government that serves the common good. If Bush succeeds, the Democratic Party may become a weakened shadow that can rarely, if ever for very long at a stretch, deploy the national authority for great public ends. It happened here before -- after the Progressive era in the 1920s that led to the crash and Great Depression. It can happen again.

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