I really will get back to technical blogging tomorrow, but politics are consuming too many mental cycles right now.

As I said here, one monumental failure of the current political "share the wealth" thinking is that they simply seek to avoid reality.  We cannot pretend that there are no consequences to taxing wealth.

From this article on Corey the well driller, it would seem that the current political Left feels that people who "fall through the cracks" because they didn't have health care are of utmost national concern.  People like Corey who finally turn a profit after 30 years of struggle and "fall through the other cracks" are not their concern.  After all there are precious few people in America like Corey the well driller and while we as a nation need them, politicians don't need their votes.

As I have said often enough in the past, our notion of the "wealthy" that we "need to tax more" is astoundingly unhinged from reality to begin with.  In addition to my previous thoughts on how horribly dishonest it is to say that Obama's plan will only tax those making more than $250,000 per year, there are some other concerning aspects of this mentality.

First, the plan is a broad stroke.  Even if one bought into the horribly flawed idea that we should tax these "wealthy" people we have used a poor metric with which to delineate them.  In, say, Missouri, $250,000 is a fortune because the cost structure there is cheap compared to other areas of the country.  In Wisconsin, $250,000 doesn't go quite as far but is still a very nice income.  In Manhattan where the cost of living is something like 400% higher than in Milwaukee, a salary of $250,000 may very well include plain old "working middle class professionals". 

The goals and methods of the would-be wealth re-distributors can be even more suspect (if such is possible) using another mathematical method of evaluation.  Let us suppose that the range of income in the United States is from $Zero to $5billion per year.  We have defined the "wealthy", the point at which we should take an extra pound of flesh from people, as $250,000/year.  $250,000 is .005% of $5billion.  If I'm making $250,000 per year and in the same tax bracket, in the same "Abused, eat the rich, they've got plenty" demographic as people making 20,000 times what I make what does that tell me about the nation?  If I'm middle management at an insurance company do I feel that those economic powerhouses are my Peers?  I'm in the same class as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates?  Really?

We have not only demonized Wealth in this nation, we have hijacked the term to mean "anyone making more than I expect I ever will".  Many employees no doubt consider their direct supervisors a member of this privileged upper crust, people who at best make perhaps 30% to 50% more than they do and are already being punished for it via higher marginal tax rates and loss of various categories of deductions. 

This populist class warfare goes hand-in-hand with another phenomenon unfolding over the past decades in America.  When Americans observe a candidate who is well educated, articulate, intelligent, and cultured, we call them an Elitist.  We say that it's bad to be an Elitist.  We say that the other candidate who has few or none of these desirable qualities is "more like me", "down to earth", "someone I could have a beer with", and we want them to call the shots instead of the Elitist.

We exalt the common and seek to elevate the mediocre to the level of the Good.  We have declared, as a nation, that those who Do have fewer rights than those who Can't or Won't.   We seek to punish our betters precisely because of their qualities that we ourselves have identified as Good and Admirable.

America is currently engaged, on all possible fronts, in a War on Excellence.