Over at Slate, Daniel Gross is explaining, once more, the role the Alternative Minimum Tax continues to play in the Bush administration’s deceptive tax policies.

The AMT is a bizarre parallel-universe of taxation with its own set of complex rules that differ from the normal IRS system. It was passed decades ago as an effort to prevent gazillionaires from using elaborate tax shelters to reduce their tax bills to zero. For many years it was easily ignored by the vast majority of Americans, and as recently as a few years ago the only non-super-rich people who worried about it were tech-industry types who’d hit the stock-option jackpot but played their cards wrong.

But the AMT was designed with its very own time-bomb: It was never indexed for inflation, and so each year the rising tide of inflation — even the slow, relatively benign inflation the U.S. has experienced in the last decade — lifts more and more middle-class Americans into its maw. The obvious answer is to fix it, either by repeal or by indexing it for inflation so it continues to apply only to the gazillionaires who were its original target. Shouldn’t be so hard, right?

Wrong. Because all those improbable Bush Administration forecasts of gradual deficit reduction depend on vast new federal revenue from the AMT. If you “fix” the AMT, you plunge the government way deeper in the debt hole than even the shysters running Bush’s fiscal policy could defend.

In other words, those big tax cuts that the administration keeps demanding be made permanent aren’t tax cuts at all — they’re tax transfers. The Bush policy is simple: Let’s cut taxes on dividends — which happen to fall most heavily on the wealthiest Americans — and raise taxes, via the AMT, on the upper-middle class (and increasingly, the middle class). Right now, the AMT is kicking in on two-income families with kids earning $100,000 or more in high-tax states like California and New York. (And yes, it’s been often noted that the AMT tends to hurt those in “blue” states most.) Each year the threshold gets lower.

Gross warns that this spring the IRS will report big fat gains in federal tax receipts and the Bush team will crow about how successful their supply-side tax cut has been. Don’t buy it: They’re not cutting taxes, they’re playing a shell game, and — unless we make a point of exposing the fraud and educating ourselves and our neighbors — we’re the suckers.

When the Enron and Worldcom scandals unfolded in the early years of this decade, it became clear that we were looking at two different species of corruption: let’s call them old-school and New Wave. Old-school corruption is blunt and obvious; you’d know it for what it is if you bumped into it in a dark alley, which is probably where you’d find it. Large sums of cash are moved unceremoniously from place to place; ledgers are altered; bribes land in open palms.

Worldcom, clearly, was old-school — out-and-out, prima facie fraud. Enron was something equally insidious but entirely different in form: a kind of corruption that consisted largely of deliberate and elaborate bending of arcane rules, game-playing in largely incomprehensible gray areas of accounting rules and laws, and fabrication of sham institutions to give these activities bureaucratic shelter — all orchestrated with a ruthless goal in view, but all pursued under rationales that at least appeared plausible to the casual spectator.

As today’s political corruption scandals roll out in depressing sequence, it’s clear that they, too, divide along these old-school/New Wave lines. Here, the outline of the Duke Cunningham Congressional bribery scandal — which would make wonderful opera bouffe if it weren’t our money and security on the line — is pure old-school. Check out, for instance, this report from TPM’s Daily Muck with the latest from Cunningham’s prosecutors: The congressman had deals with a couple of defense contractors who were kicking back part of their 800-percent profit as bribes to him, and when the Pentagon was slow in paying them, he’d “browbeat” Defense officials to move their butts, and demand that they be fired if they failed to comply.

But Tom Delay, he’s plainly a New Wave sort of crook — the Andy Fastow of the Republican Party. He played in the nether reaches of election law and congressional process the way Enron’s execs and accountants danced beyond the margins of finance law and corporate governance rules. As dramas of naked political power-flexing, patronage-wielding and election-influencing, they are riveting; we could admire Delay’s sheer creative chutzpah if we weren’t still suffering from its consequences.

With old-school crooks, exposure is a straightforward matter of accumulating enough evidence to obtain a confession. New Wavers are tougher to nail, because they’ll always be able to argue that their aggressive interpretation of the letter of various rules and laws wasn’t technically illegal. So what if their actions involved phantom companies, slush-fund transfers, or unprecedented mid-decade redistricting? Do the laws and rules explicitly say this stuff is illegal? Can you prove it? All of it? What if they were just being creative and entrepreneurial? If you prosecute them, aren’t you just telling businesspeople and politicians to stop dreaming of new ways to do things?

When you hear that argument, pinch yourself if you start to succumb, and remember: it’s just an apologia for the same old corruption in a clever new guise.