You seem to forget that many of us ordinary tax payers are caught in AMT hell. We are certainly not incredibly wealthy, we do ok by many standards. However, AMT triggered for us even though we have no deductions besides donations to charity and state tax. We have no dependents and I think our contributions for Federal tax before adding in the AMT was more than sufficient. We live in a State (Ca.) which requires high incomes just to get by.
This is probably the view of the majority of AMT payers. I'll take the contrarian position and say that "AMT hell" is something of an overstatement. I don't know how you got into an AMT position, but I can do some sample calculations for a "typical" high income family.
The median income for a family of four is about $70,000. Consider a family with 3 times that income, or $210,000. I think that if they get "caught" by the AMT, then the total of their regular FIT plus their AMT will be about 12% of their gross income.
That's a significant amount of money. But the total individual FIT is about 10% of total personal income. IF we're going to collect that much in FIT, it seems pretty plausible that a family with 3x the median income would pay slightly more than 10%.
Now the "IF" is a big deal. I find it easy to say that the federal gov't spends "too much", so we need to collect too much in taxes to cover all that spending. But, IF we're going to spend that much, we ought to collect enough tax to pay for it, and the AMT doesn't seem to be a terribly "unfair" tax to me.
My calculation for a "typical high income family" goes like this. (Maybe I'm misunderstanding the AMT rules, but this is what I get from the worksheet in the tax return.)
The AMT allows deductions for 401k contributions, charitable contributions, and mortgage interest. Suppose they add up to 25% of this family's $210,000 gross income. That leaves $157,500. Then they get the $66,250 fixed deduction, leaving $91,250 taxed at a flat 26%. That's $23,725. If their regular FIT is less than this, then AMT increases the total up to this amount. So the FIT including AMT is 11.3% of their gross income.