If the Democrats are serious about actual governing and fixing the many urgent problems that afflict our nation, they have to stop opposing any attempts to fix things like this. Charlie Pierce, who's now the political editor at Esquire.com, really lets loose his wrath on this latest example of sheer greed:



At a time when the president's getting some real traction with his new, not-quite-red meat rhetoric, and with an actual movement rising on the Left that, for all its diverse enthusiasms, is primarily about the opportunity buried in the visceral knowledge that we're all being swindled, and with the 2012 re-election utterly dependent on their doing something to turn the country's employment situation from surface-of-Mercury to merely bleak, the Democrats seem now ready to run the truck back over their own feet again. And it doesn't seem possible to believe that there are some Democrats who actually would sabotage the whole effort over something like this:

Other Democrats have expressed concern about a call to end the so-called carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund and private equity managers to count their income as capital gains, and thus pay taxes at a significantly lower rate than most individuals.

There is no excuse for this tax break. None whatsoever. It has nothing to do with creating jobs. It doesn't do anything except make extraordinarily rich people even richer, for which they demonstrate their gratitude by crashing the whole economy. It has nothing to do with anything except the tender feelings of people who'd sell their white-haired grandmothers to the Somali pirates for whatever change fell out of their purses. If we are at all serious about The Deficit — and we're not, except as a vehicle for working out our economic sociopathy on the less fortunate — this monstrosity wouldn't exist at all. More than anything else, this tax break symbolizes perfectly the forces behind the ruination of responsible government and of a viable economy. This thing couldn't represent GREED more perfectly if it were drawn up by Thomas Nast. It is a perfect campaign issue for any Democratic party truly interested in economic justice. Andrew Jackson could run against it.

And this is what breaks the deal for some Democrats. The unbridled avarice of some hedge-fund cowboys. The ultimate feast of fat things, to turn Isaiah on his head for a minute. They deserve whatever befalls them. Truly, they do.