Interesting article in the National Journal:  A Bad Tax With Good Timing, by Jonathan Rauch:

In 1969, Treasury Secretary Joseph W. Barr announced that 155 taxpayers with incomes over $200,000 had paid no income tax. "The news created a political firestorm," write Leonard E. Burman, William G. Gale, and Jeffrey Rohaly of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. "In 1969, members of Congress received more constituent letters about the 155 taxpayers than about the Vietnam War." Thus was born the alternative minimum tax, more widely known as the AMT — the single most reviled initialism in the tax lexicon, which is saying something.

Well, any policy so uniformly reviled in Washington can’t be all bad. The AMT is a dog, no doubt about that. But every dog has its day.

Seen in a fiscal light, the AMT looks less like a train wreck than a safety net. It produces automatic tax increases as inflation extends its reach, and does so at precisely the time when tax increases will be most needed. If one believed in providence, one might say it had pre-positioned the AMT to kick in at America’s hour of maximum fiscal need and minimum political will.

The upshot is that the AMT may spur a broad tax reform; it may lay the groundwork for a broad reform; or it may simply turn out to be a politically tolerable tax increase at a time when the country needs all the fiscal help it can get. In a first-choice world, the AMT is a horror. But in Tax Land, which is a third-choice world at best, the AMT looks heaven-sent.