"Hi! I'm from the Government, and I'm here to cut your taxes"

Did you notice? President Bush asked Congress to map out income-tax hikes totaling as much as $600 billion to $800 billion over ten years. That's how much the Administration needs to kill the monstrous alternative minimum tax without increasing future budget deficits.

What's that? You say it's long been obvious the AMT soon must be done away with or toned down? Maybe so. But future budget deficits have been estimated on the assumption that those AMT revenues will keep on snowballing, engulfing and devouring the incomes of Americans with incomes of $75,000 and up. As this article in today's New York Times suggests, many of your trust and investment clients are among the victims.

Conspiracy theorists suspect the AMT was deliberately designed to cancel much of the benefit of the Bush tax cuts. Nah! Too clever.

But speaking of conspiracies, what's all this talk about killing the death tax? Even if the federal estate tax is abolished, various states are busy revving up their own death taxes. Incautious enough to die in Connecticut? Beware of a death tax with a top rate of 16%. Washington State? 19%

Florida, by contrast, allows residents to die tax free. Could that have anything to do with the 15%-or-more population increase that Florida expects by 2010?