最低稅負制評介

從今(2005)年五月起，在大眾媒體不斷報導之下，很多人對最低稅負制(alternative minimum tax, AMT)因此琅琅上口，彷彿租稅改革即將如火如荼展開。但是，一般社會大眾之多數，可能仍不知所云。而沒有租稅專業知識，卻要凝聚共識的「公民會議」之成員，則須從頭教起。

This paper takes a deep-probing but easy-to-understand approach to introducing and discussing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) concept. The background to the adoption of AMT is that tax concessions are too numerous for their simultaneous removal to be politically viable. Therefore, AMT offers the next-best alternative of requiring all high earners to pay a certain amount of tax, with the aim of making taxation fairer.
This paper also submits that AMT is by its nature a second best, transitional, and partial solution. Moreover, when the United States began to implement an AMT system with no provision for adjustment of exemptions in accordance with inflation and number of dependent relatives, it meant that inflation and economic growth would result in more and more people being netted by the system, so that the cost (in terms of tax losses) of subsequently abandoning the system would grow increasingly heavy.
The adoption of AMT should be the best way out of the current tax reform difficulties. Furthermore, the draft provisions under study by the Ministry of Finance have already taken into consideration the adjustment of the NT$8 million exemption in line with inflation, and thus should have greater viability by being able to smoothly avoid the blind spot of the current U.S. AMT system.