The coming fiscal cliff

The fiscal cliff isn't a warning.  It's coming, if Obama is re-elected.  The Republicans will be vengeful and won't go along with anything he wants:

"In other words, if the American people choose Obama and his call for higher taxes this November, Republicans will let them experience it this January. In addition to the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will inflict a $165 billion tax hike on all working Americans, payroll taxes are set to go up by $125 billion, estate taxes by $13 billion and business taxes by $20 billion. The Alternative Minimum Tax patch will also expire, costing taxpayers another $118 billion, as will $21 billion in Obama stimulus tax cuts. Another $23 billion in new Obamacare taxes will also kick in.
All told, under current law, taxes will rise by $494 billion next year. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that if these tax hikes are implemented, along with $100 billion in spending cuts that Obama signed into law as part of last August’s debt deal, our economy will shrink and unemployment will rise to 9.1 percent."
--http://washingtonexaminer.com/what-would-obamas-second-term-look-like/article/2507358

You like taxes?  We will give you taxes.

===============================
The AMT will be a litmus test. It is the most likely tax to be cut back.  Democrats can't imagine that Republicans wouldn't want to change it, but believe it buddy.

"If Congress doesn’t act to prevent the $92 billion tax increase, the number of households facing the alternative tax would increase to 32.9 million from 4.4 million, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That’s an average unanticipated tax increase of about $2,800.
The effect from the AMT, as the parallel tax is known, would be immediate in early 2013 because Congress hasn’t addressed the change for tax year 2012, and taxpayers start filing returns in January. A retroactive AMT change is much more cumbersome than retroactive changes in the 2013 income tax rates, which can be handled through paycheck-withholding adjustments, said Kenneth Kies, a Republican tax lobbyist in Washington.
“The IRS would be paralyzed, not to mention the fact that the taxpayers wouldn’t get the joke,” said Kies, a Republican tax lobbyist in Washington. “This just has to be done in December.”
--http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-10/need-for-action-on-fiscal-cliff-comes-from-alternate-tax

Oh, the horrors!  The IRS would be paralyzed.