We've covered the debate on which is the least misleading baseline for revenue purposes, and we agree that no reasonable baseline exists. For the purpose of evaluating the distribution of income tax burden, however, the current law baseline is especially weak. Current policy (2009 tax rates) has a distribution of burden that the political process has vetted, for better or worse. Current law has the AMT returning to unindexed year 2000 levels. That would impose a massive tax increase on a wide swath of taxpayers from about $100k to about $500k, but it would not affect the truly rich (above $500k). The distribution of tax liabilities changes markedly in the $100k to $500k range due to the AMT springback. Nobody of any ideological stripe believes that this shift in tax burden from higher and lower incomes into the $100k to $500k range represents an improvement, let alone an ideal against which the distributional effects of tax proposals should be measured. Inclusion of the AMT springback makes the current law baseline unsuitable for distributional comparisons. The current policy baseline does not share this defect. Neither does Obama's baseline. If the objective is to choose the baseline that makes Obama's proposals look favorable to the largest number of people, I recommend choosing unindexed 1982 tax law, with 50% rates on everything over $85k. Presto: Obama is cutting taxes for everyone!