And why not? The proposal makes for great politics. Polls routinely show that Americans support higher taxes on the rich. There is no shortage of data showing that over the past few decades the rich have gained a larger and large share of all new wealth created, while paying a lower and lower percentage of their income in taxes. Even better, the proposal draws the sharpest possible contrast with Obama’s presumed opponent — Mitt Romney, who not only is rich as Midas, and paid only 14 percent of his income as taxes in his most recently released returns, but who also believes that the rich should pay even less than they do now.

However, that’s really all the Buffett rule is: pure politics. It has no chance of beating a Republican filibuster when it comes up for a vote next week in the Senate, and even if Obama is reelected in November, the chances that a new Congress would be any more amenable to a tax hike for the rich then than they are now are minimal.

There’s also good reason to question whether Obama has any real intention of following through on this promise. His record doesn’t offer grounds for optimism.

Let’s take a trip back, to April 2008. Almost exactly four years ago, in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News on Sunday, Obama vowed to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire in 2010.

“It is true that I would roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans back to the level they were under Bill Clinton, when I don’t remember rich people feeling oppressed.”

The promise to roll back the Bush tax cuts on Americans making more than $250,000 a year was a staple of his stump speech in 2008, and was almost always greeted with rapturous applause. But when push came to shove, Obama didn’t deliver. He cut a deal with the Republican opposition in late 2010, shortly after the midterm election debacle, extending the tax cuts another two years.

Obama had a halfway decent excuse. The economy sucked in 2010, and raising taxes during a recession is the definition of anti-stimulative economic policy. But many Obama supporters were deeply disappointed with how the White House failed to use its leverage to cut a better deal with Republicans. Here’s the crucial point: To keep extending the Bush tax cuts, Congress has to take positive action — i.e., they have to vote to pass a new bill. And Obama, as president, has the power to veto that bill. Let’s repeat that: Obama has the power to roll back the Bush tax cuts, by vetoing any extension passed by Congress. If Obama had chosen to effectively wield his veto threat, chances are he could have resisted Republican efforts to cut government spending — another example of unnecessary anti-stimulative economic policy — during the recession.

The Buffett rule is a different animal. Obama has no power to get it passed. It’s a rhetorical measure, designed to rev up his base and capitalize on populist resentment. That’s all well and good in an election year, but if Obama really wants to make a promise that means something, he should be shouting from the top of every hill and mountain how this time he really is going to let the tax cuts expire.

On Tuesday, Obama campaign senior adviser told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC that Obama would “absolutely” let the tax cuts expire. Scarborough scoffed, and Axelrod doubled down:

“You may not believe it Joe, but the president’s going to win in November and we are not going to extend those tax cuts for the wealthy and I’m looking forward to coming back here in the future and taking a big ‘I told you so.’”

It will be very interesting to see whether Obama repeats Axelrod’s promise during his speech on the economy at Florida Atlantic University Tuesday afternoon. Because vowing to let the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire means something. Pushing for the “Buffett rule” does not.

No one in Washington believes the Buffett Rule has any hope of passage this year. It’s largely symbolic. The vote will mark a sharp contrast with Republican Paul Ryan’s plan (enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney) to cut the tax rate on the super rich from 35 percent to 25 percent – rewarding millionaires with a tax cut of at least $150,000 a year. The vote will also serve to highlight that Romney himself paid less than 14 percent on a 2010 income of $21.7 million because so much of his income was in capital gains, taxed at 15 percent.

Hopefully in the weeks and months ahead the White House and the Democrats will emphasize three key realities:

1. The richest 1 percent of Americans are now taking in over 20 percent of total national income, and so far have raked in almost all the gains from this recovery. 30 years ago, the richest 1 percent got 9 percent of total income. Income and wealth are now more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s.

2. The richest 1 percent are paying a lower tax rate than they’ve paid since 1980. For three decades after World War II, their tax rate never dropped below 70 percent. Even considering all deductions and tax credits, they paid close to 55 percent. Under Eisenhower, the top rate was 91 percent and the effective rate was 58 percent.

3. Right now the nation faces two yawning deficits – an investment deficit and a federal budget deficit. The investment deficit includes deferred maintenance on America’s infrastructure – roads, bridges, public transit, water and sewer systems that are all crumbling – and an educational system that’s being starved for resources (the federal government pays for 8 percent of K-12 education and about 5 percent of public higher education, but could do much more). The federal budget deficit is projected to mushroom to $6.4 trillion over the next 10 years, mostly because of aging boomers and soaring healthcare costs.

Any serious person looking at these three realities would conclude that the rich should be paying far more. It’s not just a matter of fairness; it’s also a matter of patriotism.

In fact, given these realities, the Buffett Rule sets the bar too low. For most Americans, wages and benefits are declining (adjusted for inflation), net worth has been plummeting (their only asset is their homes), and the public services they rely on have been disappearing. For the top, it’s just the opposite: Their incomes are rising, their stock-market portfolios have been growing, and a growing portion of their earnings has been subject to a capital-gains tax of just 15 percent.

The Buffett Rule would generate only about $47 billion in extra revenues over the next decade, according to congressional estimates. Why not restore top rates to what they were before 1980, and match the capital-gains rate to the income-tax rate?

The money would come out of programs for the elderly, lower-middle families and the poor.

Seniors would get subsidies to buy private health insurance or Medicare – but the subsidies would be capped. So as medical costs increased, seniors would fall further and further behind.

Other cuts would come out of food stamps, Pell grants to offset the college tuition of kids from poor families, and scores of other programs that now help middle-income families and the poor.

The plan also calls for repealing Obama’s health care overhaul, thereby eliminating health care for 30 million Americans and allowing insurers to discriminate against (and drop from coverage) people with pre-existing conditions.

The plan would carve an additional $19 billion out of next year’s “discretionary” spending over and above what Democrats agreed to last year. Needless to say, discretionary spending includes most of programs for lower-income families.

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon would be spared.

So what’s the guiding principle here? Pure Social Darwinism. Reward the rich and cut off the help to anyone who needs it.

Ryan says too many Americans rely on government benefits. “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency.”

Well, I have news for Paul Ryan. Almost 23 million able-bodied people still can’t find work. They’re not being lulled into dependency. They and their families need help. Even if the economy continues to generate new jobs at the rate it’s been going the last three months, we wouldn’t see normal rates of unemployment until 2017.

And most Americans who do have jobs continue to lose ground. New research by professors Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Pikkety show that the average adjusted gross income of the bottom 90 percent was $29,840 in 2010 — down $127 from 2009 and down $4,842 from 2000 — and just slightly higher than it was 46 years ago in 1966 (all figures adjusted for inflation).

Meanwhile, America’s rich continue to grow richer — and many of them (and their heirs) are being lulled into lives whose hardest task is summoning the help.

Anyone who thought the Great Recession might reduce America’s wild lurch toward wild inequality should think again. The most recent data show that just 15,600 super-rich households – the top 1 tenth of 1 percent – pocketed 37 percent of all the economic gains in 2010. The rest of the gains went to others in the top 10 percent.

Republican Social Darwinists are determined that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent. Those cuts saved the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (roughly 1.4 million people) more money on their taxes last year than the rest of America’s 141 million taxpayers received in total income.

Thank you, House Republicans, for “sharpening the contrast” between your radical Social Darwinism and those of us who still cling to the belief that the most fortunate have a responsibility to the rest.

Part of it is that the lessons of the Great Depression belong to history, and, as such, are infinitely malleable. Arguments your grandfather would have dismissed — such as Mitt Romney’s plans to assure prosperity by topping off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion tank — are given credence today. Granddad may not have grasped Keynesian economic theory, but he remembered “Hoovervilles” and bread lines. Scrooge McDuck wasn’t a cartoon figure for nothing.

Professor Krugman acknowledges that some kinds of economic thinking seem counterintuitive. “Thus,” he writes, “it’s normal to think of the economy as a whole as being like a family, which must tighten its belt in hard times; it’s also completely wrong.” Yet it makes him crazy that even President Obama has used the belt-tightening analogy.

While deeply misleading, the family metaphor works politically because it sounds like common sense. Sometimes I wonder if Grandpa didn’t also have an advantage in living closer to the farm. Though innately conservative, rural people do understand that if you skimp on fertilizer in April, you’ll have a poor hay crop come September and a hard time getting your livestock through the winter.

But nobody ever puts it to people like that. Even somebody like Krugman can be brilliant at argumentation, less gifted at storytelling. Democrats generally have lost the knack.

The key is to stress government investment. In Arkansas, where I live, nothing could be clearer than the relationship between public investment and economic prosperity. It’s practically written on the landscape, yet many need reminding.

I recently read a beautifully written memoir called “A Straw in the Sun,” by Charlie May Simon, an Arkansas writer who homesteaded in Perry County (where I live) during the 1930s. Back then, rural Arkansans basically lived in the Third World. Simon and her neighbors grew their own food, made their own clothes, music and home brew. They had no electrical power, telephones, indoor plumbing or paved roads. Few in Perry County did. They walked to town, or hitched rides on mule-drawn wagons.

Enchanting as Simon makes it sound, the world she evokes feels not 75 years distant, but 175. After World War II, what brought Perry County into the 20th century was government investment. My 65-year-old neighbor was in high school when the main highway through the county was first paved after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bridged the Arkansas River at Conway.

So it came as something of a surprise to read that my ambitious state representative, a genial former neighbor now living over in Conway, has conceived a plan to return us to the bad old days. Supposedly by eliminating income taxes from 40 of the state’s less prosperous counties — along with concomitant cuts in public spending — GOP visionaries envision that nothing less than an economic miracle will take place.

Never mind why no such thing happened during Arkansas’s first 150 years or so of statehood. Thankfully, the proposal got nowhere. What’s amazing to me, however, is that otherwise intelligent people could be so blinded by ideology as to entertain so preposterous a scheme. Believe me; these fellows are rapt with sincerity. What’s more, their ideological brethren are taking over state governments from sea to shining sea.

That Conway, a pleasant town of approximately 60,000, should serve as the epicenter of this backward revolution strikes me as comically ironic. Although filled with Republicans, there are few cities of like size whose prosperity depends more obviously upon public largess. Located along Interstate 40, it’s also home to three state agencies and the University of Central Arkansas, a rapidly growing public institution. Trim UCA’s budget 20 percent, and Conway’s economy would go into a tailspin.

The city’s two private colleges are greatly dependent upon state-sponsored tuition scholarships, just as its nonprofit medical center relies upon Medicaid and Medicare. I could go on. Even Conway’s two newest large private employers are Internet- (hence government) dependent.

Around these parts, alas, Democrats have lost control of the story line.

The right’s derangement on the subject of taxation is often blamed on the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, or tax-revolt populists like California’s Howard Jarvis in the 1970s. But it has deeper philosophical roots in the libertarian movement, which dominates the right’s economic policy, though not its foreign policy or social policy.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a young neoconservative (when that meant Cold War liberal, not Middle East-bombing neo-imperialist), my work helping William F. Buckley, Jr. on his book on national service, “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country” (1990), took me to a conference on the subject of national service at the Hoover Institution. I found myself sitting at an outdoor lunch table with Milton Friedman, the patron saint of the Chicago School of free market economics. Like other neoconservatives of the time, I had no objections to the post-Roosevelt middle class welfare state, and I took the opportunity to ask Friedman, a libertarian (he preferred to call himself a “classical liberal”) how he justified taxation, in his philosophy.

“I don’t! I don’t!” he said, dramatically. “When the government taxes me, it’s the same as a robber pointing a gun at my head and demanding my money!” He pointed a finger at his head to make the point. Reporting this conversation to Buckley, I told him, “Milton Friedman may be a great economist, but if he thinks that taxation is theft, he is a moral and political idiot.” Unfortunately that particular brand of idiocy has become Republican orthodoxy.

To the extent that the radicals of the right (a better term than conservatives) admit the need for taxation, they tend to favor replacing all other taxes, including income and Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, with a federal flat tax on consumption. There is a case to be made for a national consumption tax like a value-added tax or VAT (more on this below) but as one among several taxes, not as a replacement for all other kinds of taxes.

There is not a single advanced industrial democracy in the world that relies for its revenues on a single, flat national consumption tax. Not one. The absence of foreign examples may not bother right-wing proponents of American “exceptionalism” or uniqueness. But the rest of us must wonder, if funding all government spending from a single flat consumption tax is such a brilliant idea, why hasn’t some nation somewhere, perhaps a small nation, already tried the experiment? Libertarians can point to Chile as an example of a country that has attempted another of their panaceas, the privatization of Social Security. But they cannot point to any country that has adopted anything resembling their flat tax proposal.

Alas for the American left, the popular progressive alternative also fails the same test of international comparison. To judge from center-left journalism, more progressive opinion leaders oppose than support a federal consumption tax like a VAT, on the grounds that it would be regressive (a genuine problem, although one that can be ameliorated in various ways). But the Nordic welfare state, which represents a kind of utopia for much of the American center-left, rests on three revenue streams — not only income and payroll taxes, like those of the U.S., but also VAT revenues. The U.S. is unique among industrial democracies in its over-reliance on income and payroll taxes and its lack of a national consumption tax.

Now if you want to have a Nordic-style public spending without a Nordic-style VAT, you must jack up progressive income taxes, payroll taxes or both to extremely high levels. Much of the American left, it appears, would be comfortable with far higher progressive income taxes, funding much greater redistribution of income. Again, the question of international comparisons comes up: If this is a workable idea, why is that no other countries combine an ultra-progressive income tax with a much larger welfare state and no national consumption tax, not even the Nordic social democracies? Turnabout is fair play. If progressives gloat that no country in the world organizes its tax system along the lines favored by the flat-taxers of the right, conservatives can reply that not even the biggest and most generous European welfare states rely as much as American liberals would like on extremely progressive income taxes.

The political center, in the American tax debate, is represented by fiscally-conservative “deficit hawks” of both parties, who worry more about federal deficits and the national debt than the supply-siders of the right or the Keynesians of the left. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, these earnest, rather solemn and puritanical folks tirelessly promote a bipartisan compromise: Raise revenues while lowering overall tax rates, by eliminating tax expenditures (“loopholes”) not only for the rich but also for the middle class.

In their own way, these centrists are as unworldly when it comes to the politics of taxation as the flat-taxers of the right or the redistributionists of the left. Bipartisan commissions can publish all the reports they want, but the odds that Congress will eliminate popular tax expenditures like the home mortgage interest deduction and the child tax credit are — as we say in Texas — slim to none, and Slim left town.

The centrist tax alternative, like the other two, fails the Other Country test. Centrist tax experts, not without reason, are afraid that lobbyists for special interests will riddle with any system of taxation with loopholes. They insist that all items should be taxed the same. On pain of losing membership in their professional guild, or so it seems, think-tank tax experts invariably say that the regressive effects of taxes on low-income Americans, including consumption taxes like a VAT, should be dealt with, not by exempting certain necessities like food and clothing from taxation, but by rebates.

For these thoughtful centrist tax experts, I have one question: Where is Rebate Land? Where is the country that taxes baby food at the same rate that it taxes cigarettes and alcohol and compensates by paying rebates to its citizens? In Europe? In Asia? In Latin America? Every democracy that has a VAT exempts certain items or taxes them at a lower rate than others. Exempting some items means VAT rates on others must be higher. So what? This upsets a few full-time tax experts and a few economics professors, but the rest of the human race somehow manages to live with the increased complexity that results in the tax code.

I don’t mean to discourage a vigorous debate about the future of American taxation. On the contrary, as Bruce Bartlett argues in his excellent, bestselling new guide to American tax reform, “The Benefit and the Burden,” the American tax code needs periodic pruning if it is not to be overrun with special-interest weeds.

My point is that the three currently-popular options for tax reform — the conservative flat tax, the liberal ultra-progressive income tax and the centrist formula of lowering rates while slashing loopholes — are all unrealistic, in different ways. Sorry, conservatives — if the U.S. gets a VAT or another national consumption tax, it will be in addition to federal and income taxes, not in place of them. Sorry, progressives — while income taxes on the rich can indeed be raised considerably, there really is a point at which doing so will backfire by encouraging massive tax avoidance or capital flight. The experience of Europe suggests that it makes more sense to add a VAT to the mix of American federal taxes, if you want to fund a European-style middle-class welfare state.

Oh, and tax centrists — if your goal in your career is not just to trim but to completely eliminate tax expenditures for middle class Americans as well as the rich, you are going to have a sad, frustrated life.