Did Republicans get tricked into a super-sized tax increase as part of the debt-limit deal? That depends on who you ask.

There's a lot of chatter among conservative Republicans that they may have just signed on to a stealth $3.5 trillion tax hike. That's because the "baseline" that congressional scorers use assumes that after 2012, all of the Bush tax cuts will expire and the Alternative Minimum Tax will start to hit up to 25 million tax filers. It also assumes the full implementation of several hundred billion dollars of...