Do You Owe The AMT?

American educational reformer Horace Mann called education “the great equalizer.” In football, it’s been said that turnovers are the great equalizer. In taxes, there’s also an equalizer of sorts; it’s called the alternative minimum tax, or AMT. Instituted in 1969, it was intended to ensure that the very rich didn’t pay a lower effective tax rate than everyone else.¹

In recent years, however, the “very rich” weren’t the only ones who needed to be concerned about the AMT. Because the AMT was not indexed for inflation until 2013, millions of middle-class Americans were being forced to pay it. Thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, that number is falling, once again. Per the most recent data available, only 0.1% of taxpayers pay the AMT.^1,2

It may be easiest to think of the AMT as a separate tax system with a unique set of rules for deductions, which are more restrictive than those in the traditional tax system.