The various tax laws known collectively as the "Bush tax cuts" - principally the enactments in 2001 and 2003 - include a sunset provision that will cause the tax cuts to expire on December 31, 2010. If Congress does not intervene this month, all the tax rate, brackets, and other laws that were changed by the Bush tax cuts will revert to what they were 10 years earlier at the end of 2000. This column shows how much income tax you will owe in 2011 under this scenario. For detailed information visit this page.

Note: We include an AMT patch by default in the full expiration scenario because we want to isolate the effects of the Bush tax cuts on the ordinary tax. AMT parameters, unlike most parameters in the tax code, are not indexed to rise automatically with inflation. Congress has dealt with this by passing temporary 'patches' on a year-to-year basis. We consider the AMT patch to be a separate issue from the rest of the Bush tax cuts, and assume that Congress will pass one even if they allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. The patch included in this scenario uses the parameters proposed by Congressional Republicans, as they are the only group so far to have proposed specific numbers. To see what would happen if Congress does not pass any AMT patch, uncheck the box in the "advanced" area of the calculator.