CAP has a graph showing how tough wealthy Americans have it these days:

America’s millionaires won’t be asked to contribute a single dime [towards deficit reduction]. That’s unfortunate because they certainly can afford it. Not only have their incomes been skyrocketing but data released this week by the Internal Revenue Service reveal that their tax rates have plunged over the last two decades. As a percentage of their incomes, millionaires are now paying about one-quarter less of their income to federal taxes than they did in the mid-1990s. So what’s causing the tax bills of the wealthiest to drop? The average millionaire will pay $136,000 less this year because the Bush tax cuts are still in effect, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 lowered the top marginal rate from the Clinton-era 39.6 percent to 35 percent. They also dropped the rates on capital gains and dividend income to a historically low 15 percent. (Capital gains rates had already been cut from 28 percent to 20 percent in 1997.) [...] And it was a super-boon to mega-millionaires and billionaires. IRS data show that the tax rates of the richest 400 Americans declined from 29.9 percent in 1995 to 18.1 percent in 2008, largely because that exclusive group derives two-thirds of its income from capital gains.

Why, oh why, have our deficits been ballooning? Perhaps we should ask a bunch of Bush-era hacks about that, and what they think we should be doing about it.

Oh, wait. That's exactly what we've been doing. And the answer always comes back "cut aid to poor people."

This is just a random thought, but it's sure been a long time since I heard the phrase "compassionate conservatism." Now it's all about hurting people so that the rich can collect even more of that cash.

