Like other federal tax bills in recent years, the one passed last week is shortsighted, fiscally reckless and astonishingly unfair to the middle class and low-income taxpayers.

No doubt this five-year-old pattern has something to do with the remarkably low approval ratings the American public gives President Bush and Congress.

The new tax legislation has many problems, but three stand out:

n It will add to the federal debt, which in recent months has climbed above $8.3 trillion. Even if some of the tax cuts and loopholes could be justified, Bush and Congress should have figured out how to pay for them.

Some lawmakers in both parties suggested this. But most of their colleagues prefer to present the latest round of tax cuts to the public as another free lunch.

n Congress and Bush have failed once again to do the one simple task that obviously should be done: permanently fix the Alternative Minimum Tax.

This tax was set up decades ago to ensure that people with high incomes would pay at least something. But the tax needs to be corrected for inflation so it doesn't hit people with incomes further down the scale.

Five years ago, Bush and Congress could have easily fixed this problem permanently. Yet now the money for this has been frittered away, and Republican leaders offer only a meager alternative: a one-year "patch" and continued uncertainty for middle-income taxpayers.

n The new legislation would continue the pattern of favoring not just high incomes but extremely high incomes. An estimated 80 percent of the benefits would go to the top 10 percent. A fifth of the benefits would go to the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

Some Republicans argue that these people deserve the most cuts because they pay so much of the regular federal income tax. But that ignores the bigger tax picture.

The biggest tax for most Americans is the Social Security tax, which claims much larger slices of low and middle incomes than of high incomes.

Millions of people pay more Social Security taxes each year. Yet Bush and Congress have continued to focus on cutting the taxes that bother wealthy people the most — the regular income tax, estate taxes and capital gains taxes.

Objections to this one-sided approach are met with Republican accusations of "class warfare." Yet Congress and President Bush year after year champion tax bills that favor one economic class over everyone else.