If the New America Foundation had hoped to umpire a snarled dispute between Democrats and Republicans on fixing the alternative minimum tax, its hopes were not advanced at a seminar today featuring advocates for both sides. The two parties are at swords' points over whether to hike other taxes in order to offset an estimated $50 billion revenue loss if Congress decides to prevent the AMT from biting some 23 million additional income taxpayers this calendar year.

A panel of tax policy mavens -- Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute, Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center, Robert Carroll of the Treasury Department, Aviva Aron-Dine of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and former Rep. Bill Frenzel, R-Minn. -- all generally agreed that AMT is bad policy and should be radically altered or scrapped. But the immediate issue -- as NAF's Maya MacGuineas, who also heads the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, observed -- was how to patch it up now.

On that score, House Majority Leader Hoyer insisted that the Democratic-controlled House's recently passed remedy must, in the name of fiscal responsibility, prevail. It calls for offsetting tax increases to plug the hole that any fix would cost in lost revenue. "Not paying for AMT would not only be a [policy] mistake," Hoyer told the panel of experts, "it would be immoral." Future taxpayers, he said, would have to pay for the debt incurred by today's Congress if it again fails to balance the budget.

But House Budget ranking member Paul Ryan, R-Wis., countered that offsets should not be included in an AMT patch, since that would suck $50 billion in other taxes out of the private economy, and that his own tax package should be adopted instead to ensure against the growth of government at the expense of economic growth. Among other things, his proposal would repeal the AMT. "This great nation should keep its government lean and let people keep more of what they earn," Ryan said.