Frankly, the thing that upsets me most about Washington is how real people often get caught in the crossfire when powerful people fight. Often, the damage is unintentional, but that's no excuse.

So it may be with the AMT -- the Alternative Minimum Tax. Quick history: the AMT was designed to make it harder for a handful of rich people to avoid paying any taxes. (For more information, check out this report by the Tax Policy Center: The Individual Alternative Minimum Tax.) Problem is, it was never indexed for inflation, so over the years the AMT has pulled in more and more upper-middle class folks. If nothing is done, it could -- "could" being the important word here -- become a tax on the middle class. But Congress patches the AMT every year by indexing the exemption to inflation.

So, we come to the present. The Democrats want to patch the AMT. Republicans want to patch it too. The only difference is, Democrats want to pay for the fix by raising other taxes on Wall Street private equity shops. It's that whole fiscal discipline thing that worked for Bill Clinton. Republicans argue that it doesn't make sense to pay for a tax fix that was never intended to reach millions of people.

Whatever you think of those arguments, we can agree that poor people and lower-income Americans are safely out of harms way in this debate. After all, they don't make enough to be hit by the AMT. You usually have to make well over $100,000 and live in a high-tax state to have that privilege. But this being Washington, there are unintended consequences. Kevin McCormally, our tax expert friend from Kiplinger's Personal Finance, tells me that low-income people are often desperate to get their tax refunds. Problem is, the AMT fight might delay the IRS in processing early returns, because it is so busy programming its computers to cope with the late AMT fix.

Kevin is worried that poor people will go to tax providers offering refund expectations loans charging interest rates of up to 1,000%. Unintended consequences indeed. A fight over taxing the very richest people in America may hurt some of the poorest people in America. Let's hope this debate wraps up soon.