Congress should extend the 2001-03 personal tax cuts and revive a business tax break enacted in 2010 to avoid the fiscal cliff, says Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Media.

“Congress should extend all individual tax rates through 2013,” he writes in The Wall Street Journal. “This will let Americans keep more of what they have earned, and it will give smaller businesses more certainty to invest.”

Congress also should create another “patch” for the alternative minimum tax (AMT), so that more than 27 million middle-income Americans don’t get hit when their AMT exemption expires Dec. 31, Forbes says.

Editor's Note: Economist Unapologetically Calls Out Bernanke, Obama for Mishandling Economy. See What They Did

In addition, he states, Washington should leave the maximum dividend tax at 15 percent, rather than letting it soar to 39.6 percent.

Of the 25.4 million tax returns that included dividends taxable at 15 percent in 2010, 63 percent came from people over the age of 50, according to Ernst & Young. So it’s an issue for seniors, Forbes writes.

Finally, Congress should resume the 2010-11 rule that granted businesses tax deductions for 100 percent of their capital investments. That would help spark investment, he states.

Without action from Washington, the fiscal cliff could be devastating, economists say.

"[W]hen rates are higher, central banks can easily lower them to provide a counterweight to austerity,” Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Reuters. “But when rates are near zero, as they are in the United States, it's harder to ease the pinch.”

Editor's Note: Economist Unapologetically Calls Out Bernanke, Obama for Mishandling Economy. See What They Did