“Who are these lucky duckies?” the editors asked.

The editorial was widely ridiculed as an example of ideological stubbornness gone disastrously, hilariously overboard. “One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The New Republic.

Chait and countless others pointed out that the Journal’s argument was both factually wrong — it considered only the federal income tax, not all the taxes that poor and middle-class people pay, in particular hefty payroll taxes like Social Security — and culturally out of touch. Had the editors ever met a person of little means? Did they realize that being poor, while perhaps an attractive tax shelter, tended to come with such hard-to-bear downsides as not knowing where your next meal will come from?

You might think the chilly reception to the Journal’s tax-the-poor idea would have pushed conservatives away from the idea. But you’d be wrong. Last Monday, the Washington Post reported that the Treasury Department and the White House Council of Economic Advisers are looking for ways to show that the rich are overtaxed and the poor are undertaxed. Some liberal economists see these developments as the opening shots in a long-term effort by conservatives to get closer to what has long been a dream of theirs — the elimination of the current, slightly progressive federal tax system, and the institution of a flat tax.

A flat tax is one whose rate is the same across all income levels — people making $20,000 a year will pay the same percentage of their salaries or purchases (10 or 20 or 30 percent, say) as those making $200,000 or $2 million. It was a hot idea in the mid- to late 1990s, but none of the flat-tax proposals amounted to anything — they cost too much, or seemed too unfair, or both. But Republicans are trying once again to flatten taxes — only this time, they’re doing it a bit more quietly and much more slowly, laying a political and cultural groundwork instead of simply calling for the immediate scrapping of the tax code, as many did in the 1990s.

According to Grover Norquist, an influential conservative lobbyist and the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Republicans will soon attempt to pass some of the tax initiatives that his group considers key to the eventual establishment of a flat tax. The administration is likely to ask the new Congress for lower taxes on corporate dividends and business expenses, both of which, Norquist said, would have “pro-growth” effects.

Like many of the tax measures conservatives embrace, however, these new cuts will favor the wealthiest Americans. Indeed, that’s the political rub of flattening taxes: If you want to replace a progressive tax system — one in which wealthier people pay higher tax rates — with a flat tax and still maintain comparable government revenue, you can’t avoid cutting taxes for the rich and raising taxes on the middle class and the poor. Tax-policy conservatives say this is only fair: “No American worker should be punished by being taxed at a higher rate because they work hard, take a second job or work overtime or on Saturdays,” ATR says in a recent newsletter. “All income should be treated equally.” But is the majority of the public willing to give a tax break to the rich — with an increase, or no break, for themselves — just to be fair?

That doesn’t seem likely. And perhaps that explains the Wall Street Journal editorial and other conservative efforts to convince poor and middle-class Americans that they have good reason to pay more in taxes: They must do so to save our democracy. Republicans have long argued that the progressive tax system constrains overall economic performance; now they’re arguing that it also lets people feel OK about demanding government benefits, which to them is an unmitigated horror.

The idea that the poor aren’t taxed enough would seem politically indefensible, but some conservatives are coming up with a number of tortured explanations to support it — including the creative suggestion that the Social Security tax, the most burdensome tax on the poor, is not really a tax at all. (It’s a retirement program!)

Liberal economists, by contrast, say that the poor aren’t undertaxed at all; the rich pay such a high share of taxes, they maintain, because they are so much richer than (perhaps ever) before. But some economists worry that the administration could gain devotees for its tax-the-poor ideas, which would be a major boon to conservatives’ long-term flat-tax goals. “They’re trying out lots of different things,” says William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “But I think it would be a mistake to say they can’t possibly believe this. It’s a very well orchestrated campaign.”

During the past couple of decades, the wealthiest Americans have been paying an increasingly larger share of the federal income tax money collected by the government each year. The richest 1 percent — those earning about $290,000 and up — contribute 37 percent of the government’s total income-tax take. The wealthier half of Americans pay 96 percent of the income tax burden, while the poorest 50 percent contribute only about 4 percent. This arrangement may seem quite nice for the majority of the population, but many fiscal conservatives worry that it will lead the United States to big-government perdition.

“How can any free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government?” Rep. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., asked at a lecture he gave to the Heritage Foundation in 2001. “Today, the majority of Americans can vote themselves more generous government benefits at little or no cost to themselves. As a result, most have little fiscal incentive to restrain the continued growth of Big Government and the entitlements it dangles before them.”

But is the rich’s share of the tax burden really significantly different from what it was in other periods? Not really. William Beach, a right-of-center economist at Heritage, points out that before the U.S. collected income taxes, most federal money came from property owners and others — like railroad operators — who used government services. “In that sense I guess you could say that government was paid for and supported by people who had the means to do so,” Beach says. Even after the income tax was instituted, in 1916, “it was focused on people who were wealthy and had high incomes. It was conceived as a tax that would fundamentally be paid by wealthy people.”

But everything changed in the 1930s and ’40s. “We moved to a totally different tax then. First the payroll tax, supporting Social Security — that was paid by middle- and lower-income people. Then in World War II, there were demands for revenue that were unprecedented in history. The middle class began to bear a large portion of the tax increase. And we had a change in philosophy that says there is a connection between what the government does and what the middle-class is willing to pay.”

This view held until the 1970s, when what Beach calls “the politics of tax” came into vogue; politicians realized that they could ratchet up the taxes on the rich and provide benefits to the middle class, a strategy that “disconnected an increasingly larger share of people from the tax system,” Beach says. Nobody wielded this tax-the-rich weapon more masterfully than Bill Clinton, who — to the delight of the vast number of Americans, and the frothing-at-the-mouth fury of many tax conservatives — in 1993 raised taxes on the rich, gave generous tax credits to the poor and, at the same time, ushered in a historic economic expansion.

Beach is not convinced that we are yet at a crisis point in the distribution of taxes. “I don’t know if it’s untenable,” he says. “And certainly there are countries that have not paid as much attention to this as we have. But I am concerned about the future. There should be a connection in our system between citizen benefits and what you pay. If you are disconnected, you may not realize that the benefits you’re demanding cannot be afforded.”

Beach’s position makes some sense; it’s logical to assume that if the rich keep paying more and more of the taxes, there’ll come a time when the poor and middle class might think nothing of voting themselves more and more federal money. But are we at or anywhere near that point yet? Liberal economists say we’re not.

When they talk about the tax burden on the wealthy, conservatives conveniently skip some facts. First, despite their tax burden, studies show that the rich aren’t doing so badly at all — indeed, they may be doing better than ever. And conservatives also like to discuss just the federal income tax while ignoring all the other federal taxes — especially the payroll tax — paid by the poor and middle class. When you factor in those taxes, it’s difficult to argue that the poor are very lucky duckies.

After the Washington Post reported that the administration was drawing up new models to prove that the rich pay too much of the tax burden, Joel Friedman and Isaac Shapiro, fellows at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank focusing on fiscal issues facing the poor and middle class, wrote up a quick report to explain why the rich pay as much as they do. The answer is rather obvious, but it’s one fiscal conservatives hardly ever mention: The rich are getting richer — and fast, too.

Friedman pointed to a landmark tax study published by the Congressional Budget Office in 2001. The study shows that between 1979 and 1997, the rich paid an increasing share of all taxes because their income “grew substantially faster than the income of other households.” The study says that the income of all Americans grew by about 30 percent during those years, “but that growth was highly unequal among quintiles.” (A quintile is one-fifth of the population.) “The average income of households in the highest quintile” — the top 20 percent — “was more than 50 percent higher in 1997 than in 1979, while that of the bottom fifth of households was nearly 4 percent lower,” the study says. (The rich, in fact, became even wealthier than the rest of us after Clinton raised their taxes.)

“They’re saying the burden on the top is too high,” says Friedman of the conservative position. “But they’re missing the fundamental reasons for that. The wealthy are taking a larger share of the income. Their incomes are higher.”

To make it seem as if the rich pay too much in taxes, conservatives often focus on the income tax, the most progressive of federal taxes. But “because of the regressivity of other federal taxes such as payroll and excise taxes … the overall federal tax system is only modestly progressive,” according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a public interest tax research group concerned with tax issues for the poor and middle class.

The payroll tax has long been a thorn in the side of people who say that the poor don’t pay enough in taxes, and one way they’ve responded to the argument that the poor are burdened by the tax is by ignoring it. But now they may trying a new, logic-straining approach — or at least Lawrence Lindsey, who in December was forced out of his job as chairman of the Bush administration’s National Economic Council, is doing so.

“I think the one question that has been left … is the question, ‘What is a tax?’” Lindsey asked Dec. 10, at a speech sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. He went on to suggest that because you eventually get back what you invest in Social Security, “it is purely a private good” — and that the payroll tax is, therefore, not a tax at all but rather an investment.

None of the tax experts — from either the left or the right — contacted for this article agrees with Lindsey’s view that Social Security is not a tax. Bill Ahern, a spokesman for the Tax Foundation, a group that generally favors cutting taxes, says “the assertion that it’s not a tax is something we disagree with.” He noted that payments to Social Security are mandatory — one of the defining characteristics of a tax. Bob McIntyre, a liberal economist at Citizens for Tax Justice, said a similar thing: “Don’t count anything as a tax if you want. People still have to pay it.”

And William Gale, of Brookings, notes that when Lindsey was arguing, a year and a half ago, that we needed a tax cut because taxes were at a record high, he was counting Social Security as a tax then: “If payroll taxes are not a tax, then taxes as a share of GDP are at a post-World War II low, and therefore we should try to boost taxes to bring them up to historical levels. So the administration is being hypocritical if it counts payroll taxes when it wants to say taxes are high and then doesn’t when it wants to say taxes are low.”

After Lindsey gave his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Sheldon Pollack, a professor of business law at the University of Delaware, took the podium. “I started off my talk by joking that I’ve been studying taxes for 20 years and I thought I knew what a tax was up until an hour ago,” he says. Pollack, author of a forthcoming book called “Refinancing America: The Republican Antitax Agenda,” is an expert on the Republican Party’s attempts to cut and flatten taxes, and he says, to Lindsey’s credit, that Lindsey’s comments on the status of Social Security were “very theoretical.”

Still, Pollack says that any real flat-tax plan will transfer the tax burden away from the rich and to the middle class and poor, and Lindsey’s speech was perhaps an attempt to make the case that it wouldn’t be so bad if the rich paid a little less. “There’s definitely a little bit of an ulterior motive there.”

But Pollack doesn’t expect Lindsey’s — or anyone else’s — arguments for a radical flattening of the tax system to convince enough of the public that lowering the tax burden for the rich, and raising it for everyone else, is the way to go.

He notes that some House Republicans could pass a few radical tax bills, as they have in the past. For example, in 1998, by a 219-209 vote, the House passed the Tax Code Termination Act, a bill that would have completely scrapped the federal income tax code by 2001. The bill did not specify any means of recovering the trillions that would have been lost in government revenue; it was, by any measure of civic duty, very reckless — yet after the House passed it, several members of the Senate expressed support for it. (President Clinton called it “irresponsible” and vowed to veto it.)

But it’s noteworthy that conservative groups aren’t calling for such a measure now, when they have a better chance to make it happen. Why? Pollack suggests that Republicans know that it’s pretty hard to run a government without any money, and the Bush administration, he says, “is not moving to cut back the size of government. A lot of things are funded by the income tax, including the military.”

In the end, the best way to look at the tax-the-poor rhetoric coming from some conservatives may be as pure political theater. How did conservatives manage to work toward the temporary repeal of the estate tax, a tax that most people had probably never even heard of a decade ago? They spent several years talking it down. They said it was hurting impoverished small farmers. They christened it the “death tax.” (Their discipline on this one thing is remarkable, and one that Democrats ought to try to match: How much could you change the world if everyone decided to call SUVs “death machines”?) And in time, even though it led to effectively higher taxes on the middle class, people in the middle class supported the estate-tax repeal.

So the flat-tax idea may seem easily dismissed now, but there’s real political craft to what conservatives are doing. They’re taking baby steps toward stripping most of the progressivity from the tax code, slowly passing initiatives that groups like Americans for Tax Reform say are key prerequisites for an eventual flat tax. But the campaign is not just political — it’s psychological too. Conservatives are slowly nudging the public to begin accepting a crazy thought: “Hey, aren’t I a lucky ducky? Shouldn’t I be paying more in taxes?” Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected since it first appeared.

Something is clearly the matter with Kansas, so it may be it’s not the wisest idea to go overboard extrapolating from the state’s behavior to potential developments on the national scene. On the other hand, if you’re wondering what complete Republican control of the U.S. government at the federal level would look like, Kansas does offer some clues.

Take taxes, for example. Last week, Kansas House and Senate negotiators agreed on a new tax plan that will sharply cut income taxes for wealthy state residents while at the same time raising taxes on the poor. The result, predictably, will be a shortfall in state revenue that will undoubtedly force additional cuts to state services.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities provides the analysis, but you don’t have to trust the left-leaning think tank for the spin. A newly formed group of retired Kansas Republican legislators are also declaring that enough is enough. The bottom line is this: If you’re wealthy enough and smart enough to structure your business affairs correctly, you can avoid both corporate taxes and income taxes. But if you’re poor, you will have to choose between whether you qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit, or a state-funded rebate on sales taxes charged on groceries. One or the other! Not both! Because if there is a tax loophole that favors working-class Americans, we’d better close it!

The details are different, but the basic outline is similar to the ideas codified in Paul Ryan’s Mitt Romney-endorsed budget: We’ll pay for tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting services that help the poor. Romney might not be as conservative as Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, but when the bills passed by a GOP-controlled Legislature start arriving on his desk, his response will be identical: He’ll sign it.

In what is advertised as a grand bargain between the right and the left, tax rates will be lowered, to appease conservatives, in return for closing many tax expenditures or “loopholes” (for some reason this is presented as a concession to liberals). Revenue that would otherwise be sheltered from taxation by the abolished loopholes would, to some degree, raise overall federal revenue collection, even with lower rates.

Allegedly centrist tax reform plans like Simpson-Bowles are presented by the media as nonpartisan compromises by serious, thoughtful, public-spirited experts willing to speak truth to selfish special interests. In reality the Simpson-Bowles plan and similar schemes  are best described as center-right. Generally these plans call not only for closing loopholes that disproportionately benefit the rich, like the home mortgage interest deduction, but also for cutting essential government benefits for the middle class, like Social Security and Medicare.

Alan Simpson famously mocked Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

The bargain at the core of plans like Bowles-Simpson — lowering income tax rates while reducing tax expenditures — isn’t a genuine bargain at all. If it is a good idea to raise needed revenue by closing loopholes while lowering income tax rates, why not raise even more revenue by closing loopholes without lowering income tax rates?  This kind of “grand bargain” is not based on give-and-take among two sides equally flexible and willing to bargain. Instead, it requires the center and the left to engage in unilateral surrender to extortion by the uncompromising right.

If Simpson-Bowles represents the center-right in the tax debate, the radical right is represented by flax-tax plans like the “Fair Tax” that would replace most or all federal taxes with a single national consumption tax with a single rate. A national consumption tax ought to play a role in federal tax reform — but as an addition to the mix of taxes, not as a replacement for all other taxes. A single flat tax would be extremely regressive, dramatically shifting the burden of taxation from the rich to the middle class and the poor.

Compared to the center-right and the far right, the American left has been relatively uninterested in devising plans for tax reform.  One reason is the justified focus of liberals on what the political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “pre-distribution,” like the growing pre-tax inequality highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Another factor is undoubtedly the fact that, unlike many conservatives, progressives do not believe that tax policy is all-important for economic growth, to the exclusion of other factors, like public investment, trade policy, energy policy and education. To the extent that there is a consensus on tax reform among American progressives, it would seem to combine higher taxes on the rich with more tax breaks for the middle class as well as the poor — the “Buffett Rule” (a minimum tax on millionaires) plus an expansion of the earned income tax credit, for example.

Unfortunately, when it comes to taxes, many American progressives think with their hearts, rather than with their heads. They want a welfare state on a European scale, but ignore the fact that European social democracies do not rely for revenue primarily on steep income taxes. Instead, the most generous European welfare states derive their funding from three kinds of taxes:  income taxes, payroll taxes and a consumption tax, the value-added tax (VAT). In contrast, the U.S. federal government derives its revenue chiefly from only two taxes:  the personal income tax and the payroll tax. In the U.S., consumption taxes are used by state and local governments but not by the federal government.

Michael Graetz of Columbia Law School points out that “the United States is a relatively low-tax country, but not with respect to income taxes … We typically collect about 12 percent of GDP in corporate and individual income taxes, while the OECD nations average about 13 percent. The biggest difference is that most other nations rely much more heavily on consumption taxes than we do: 11 percent of GDP in the OECD compared to about 5 percent in the United States. Indeed, we are the only OECD nation that does not impose a national level tax on sales of goods and services.”

This raises the possibility of a fourth option for American tax reform, distinct from the phony centrism of Simpson-Bowles (closing loopholes while lowering rates for the rich and cutting entitlements for the majority), radical conservatism (the single flat tax) and conventional progressivism (relying for more revenue chiefly on higher personal income taxes combined with bigger tax credits). The fourth option would reject the goal of revenue neutrality and acknowledge that, in a nation with an aging population, federal taxes can and should be permanently increased to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (These, like the rest of the American healthcare sector,  need to be made solvent by price reduction and price regulation, not rationing). Much or most of the needed additional revenue should come from the adoption by the federal government of a VAT.  A federal VAT’s revenues could be shared with state and local governments, partly replacing existing sales taxes.

This approach to radical tax reform could take more liberal or more conservative forms.   In a 2002 article and a 2007 book,  Michael Graetz has proposed one version, a “competitive tax plan” (CTP), which the Urban Institute recently analyzed.

The Graetz plan would use the revenues from a VAT to eliminate income taxes on Americans who make less than $100,000 a year.  It would also lower payroll taxes, by means of payroll tax rebates that would offset the regressiveness of the VAT.  As the tax expert Bruce Bartlett notes, the Graetz plan would eliminate popular support for income tax expenditures by eliminating income taxes on most of the middle class:  “The important thing is the basic idea of avoiding a frontal assault on tax expenditures that is likely to make trench warfare seem tame by comparison and instead just make them irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans.” A VAT can also be used to cut corporate income taxes that discourage production in the U.S., an option that the Urban Institute and the New America Foundation’s Economic Growth Program analyzed in a 2010 study.

The Graetz plan is revenue neutral but it could be tweaked to raise more revenue overall or to be more progressive. Any plan that attempts to compensate for the regressive nature of a VAT by means of credits or rebates for working Americans that would be administered through the payroll tax would necessarily reduce payroll tax revenues for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But that is a point in its favor. In a society in which more and more of the gains from economic growth are going to capital, rather than labor, it makes sense to shift from a system in which social insurance relies solely on payroll taxes to a new system in which it relies on a mix of payroll taxes and higher taxes on the consumption or non-wage income of the rich. Medicare has always been funded in part by payroll taxes and general revenues. Funding Social Security by general revenues or other dedicated taxes, in addition to payroll taxes, might permit not only income taxes but also payroll taxes to be permanently reduced for the majority of working Americans.

This approach to tax reform should appeal to progressives and genuine centrists for another reason. It would almost certainly doom the conservative project of replacing public social insurance programs with tax credits or private accounts subsidized through personal income tax expenditures, because only affluent Americans would pay income taxes and middle-class voters would no longer enjoy the benefits of those programs. Tax reform that limited income taxation to the affluent few could thus build support for the replacement of the unfair and inefficient private welfare state run through the IRS — a system that includes 401Ks, IRAs and tax credits for employer and individual health insurance — with a simpler, cheaper, more efficient system of public provision or public utility regulation in the fields of retirement security and healthcare.

Conservative Democrats and moderately conservative Republicans, masquerading as “bipartisan centrists,” have signaled that following this fall’s election they plan to push for the passage of tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles proposal in the lame duck Congress. But the American people deserve, and the American economy needs, a better option for tax reform than the pseudo-centrist proposal of further lowering tax rates on the rich while eliminating or capping tax expenditures.  Something along the lines of the Graetz plan that would use a federal VAT to cut both federal income taxes and payroll taxes for the working majority of Americans while providing adequate revenue for a twenty-first-century government is the truly radical tax reform that America needs.

The word “obsession” is no overstatement. According to the Consumer Federation of America, one in five Americans believes playing the lottery is the best way to secure his or her long-term financial future. The nation is so devoted to this form of gambling, in fact, that ABC News reports a boom in lottery ticket sales even during a recession. That translates to a record $50 billion spent on lottery tickets every year.

At that level of spending, the lottery is being seen as an investment and the trouble is that from a financial standpoint, it’s the worst kind of risk to take, because the chances of a return are so slim. Buying a lottery ticket isn’t like purchasing a volatile stock or even like playing the slot machines — both of which provide a comparatively reasonable chance of occasionally winning. On the contrary, most lotteries give you odds that are quite literally worse than your chances of being hit by lightning. Considering that, using one’s dwindling income on lottery tickets is a near guarantee to make one’s economic situation far worse – and according to estimates, that chunk is a troublingly large share of income for those who can least afford it.

Cornell University’s Garrick Blalock explains the trend by noting “that when people are feeling desperate, they are more likely to stop by the gas station and buy five lottery tickets, hoping they get a big windfall.” It’s a wholly irrational hope, of course. But at an individual level, at least the initial impulse to buy into the jackpot fantasy is vaguely understandable – we are, after all, hard-wired to believe such fantasies, especially in a media environment that tells us our wildest dreams are just a single wager away.

What’s far less rational — and far more disturbing — is the decision by governments to encourage those destructive impulses.

The whole point of republican democracy is for deliberative representative bodies to make considered policy decisions – and not to succumb to reflex. Yet, according to Bloomberg News, our legislatures are “redoubling” their sponsorship and promotion of lotteries, knowing full well they exact a hidden levy on so many citizens.

Why? As with so many public policy issues, it all goes back to the demonization of taxes. Rather than level with the public about what kind of tax rates are needed to fund the basic services, politicians would rather try to raise revenues through fees on voluntary acts — in this case, the buying of lottery tickets.

While such a tactic circumvents the typical scorched-earth fights over raising traditional taxes, it creates two problems: 1) states aren’t able to raise enough money to fund services from lotteries, whose revenues are inconsistent, and 2) the lottery revenues they do generate are tied up in illogical funding schemes — the kind that force everything from schools to open space preservation programs to veterans benefits to rely on compulsive gamblers playing games of chance.

Under what public-policy logic does that make any sense? None — and no matter how many millions of dollars the next overhyped lottery promises to raise, that fundamental truth will not change. Pretending it will only further weaves gambling pathologies into our culture, puts off a long-overdue discussion of taxes — and makes addressing genuine budget crises that much more difficult.

To add to this embarrassment of riches, the consumer group Citizens for Tax Justice reports that more than two dozen major corporations  — including GE, Boeing, Mattel and Verizon — paid no federal taxes between 2008 and 2011. They got a corporate tax break that was broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Corporate taxes today are at a 40-year-low — even as the executive suites at big corporations have become throne rooms where the crown jewels wind up in the personal vault of the CEO.

Then look at this report in The New York Times: Last year, among the 100 best-paid CEOs, the median income was more than 14 million, compared with the average annual American salary of $45,230. Combined, this happy hundred executives pulled down more than two billion dollars.

What’s more, according to the Times “… these CEO’s might seem like pikers. Top hedge fund managers collectively earned $14.4 billion last year.”  No wonder some of them are fighting to kill a provision in the recent Dodd-Frank reform law that would require disclosing the ratio of CEO pay to the median pay of their employees. One never wishes to upset the help, you know. It can lead to unrest.

That’s Wall Street — the metaphorical bestiary of the financial universe.  But there’s nothing metaphorical about the earnings of hedge fund tigers, private equity lions, and the top dogs at those big banks that were bailed out by tax dollars after they helped chase our economy off a cliff.

So what do these big moneyed nabobs have to complain about? Why are they whining about reform? And why are they funneling cash to super PACs aimed at bringing down Barack Obama, who many of them supported four years ago?

Because, writes Alec MacGillis in The New Republic — the president wants to raise their taxes. That’s right — while ordinary Americans are taxed at a top rate of 35 percent on their income, Congress allows hedge fund and private equity tycoons to pay only pay 15 percent of their compensation. The president wants them to pay more; still at a rate below what you might pay, and for that he’s being accused of – hold onto your combat helmets –  “class warfare.”  One Wall Street Midas, once an Obama fan, now his foe, told MacGillis that by making the rich a primary target, Obama is “[expletive deleted] on people who are successful.”

And can you believe this? Two years ago, when President Obama first tried to close that gaping loophole in our tax code, Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity fund, compared the President’s action to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

That’s the same Stephen Schwarzman whose agents in 2006 launched a predatory raid on a travel company in Colorado. His fund bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months – one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.

To celebrate his 60th birthday Mr. Schwarzman rented the Park Avenue Armory here in New York at a cost of $3 million, including a gospel choir led by Patti LaBelle that serenaded him with “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Does he ever — his net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion. Last year alone Schwarzman took home over $213 million in pay and dividends, a third more than 2010. Now he’s fundraising for Mitt Romney, who, like him, made his bundle on leveraged buyouts that left many American workers up the creek.

To add insult to injury, average taxpayers even help subsidize the private jet travel of the rich. On the Times’ DealBook blog, mergers and acquisitions expert Steven Davidoff writes, “If an outside security consultant determines that executives need a private jet and other services for their safety, the Internal Revenue Service cuts corporate chieftains a break. In such cases, the chief executive will pay a reduced tax bill or sometimes no tax at all.”

Are the CEOs really in danger? No, says Davidoff, “It’s a common corporate tax trick.”

Talk about your friendly skies. No wonder the people with money and influence don’t feel connected to the rest of the population. It’s as if they live in a foreign country at the top of the world, like their own private Switzerland, at heights so rarefied they can’t imagine life down below.

2) How is that possible?

Income generated from capital gains and dividends is taxed at a lower rate than wages and salary. The wealthiest Americans earn considerable income from their return on such investments.

3) How would the Buffett rule work?

By changing the tax code. The Paying A Fair Share Act of 2012 would create “a minimum effective tax rate for high-income taxpayers.” Regardless of whether their income derived from long-term capital gains, dividends, wages or salary, Americans earning over $2 million a year would be required to pay a tax rate equal to 30 percent of their total income. Americans earning between $1 million and $2 million would pay a graduated rate approaching 30 percent.

4) What impact would the Buffett rule have on the nation’s finances?

Trifling. Estimates of how much tax revenue would be generated by the Buffett rule range from $47 billion up to $160 billion over 10 years. Letting the Bush tax cuts on Americans earning over $250,000 a year expire would, in contrast, raise $800 billion over the next10 years.

5) What are the downsides of the Buffett rule?

From a progressive perspective, the downside is that the measure will not raise enough revenue to make a meaningful difference in the federal budget; the Buffett rule, in other words, won’t solve the problem of paying for increasing Medicare costs. Conservatives argue that higher taxes on the wealthy will depress investment and thus hurt job creation, but the evidence for that assertion is weak.

6) What are the chances that the Buffett rule will become law?

Zero. The Senate is scheduled to vote on the Paying A Fair Share Act of 2012 next week, but Democrats will be unable to reach the 60 votes necessary to break an inevitable Republican filibuster.

7) So what’s the point?

President Obama’s push for the Buffett rule is a strategic campaign move designed to capitalize on populist resentment generated by growing income inequality in America and to draw a sharp contrast between himself and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who only paid 14 percent of his income as taxes in 2010, on income of $42 million. It’s politics, pure and simple.