>Being part of the society at large and the more able paying a higher portion of the bill are not new concepts, nor are they punishment.
>
>The highest earners have always paid the largest portion of the tax bill. But what Obama is trying to do is taking it off the charts.

But that's just not true. At present, what they're talking about is allowing the Bush tax cuts to run out and returning to the tax rates before that, which were much, much lower than they have been at other times in our history. I don't have time today to find the great piece on this that I read a few days ago, but I just found this chart; http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=19. Here's graph of it to make it easier to see:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/missing-1000000-tax-bracket.html

(I haven't read that blog entry, just saw the chart and thought it was useful.)

Tamar