I imagine that I risk the ire of at least the most die-hard fringe Northern Ireland para-military forces or perhaps people who still revel in the Revolutionary War-era spanking of the redcoats but I’ve been carrying around this article from about a week ago that got a little attention and, then, floated out of view:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government laid out plans on Wednesday for more than $1 trillion in deficit spending over the next five years, a scale of public debt that critics say is without precedent in Britain, and ordered a 5-percentage-point increase, to 50 percent, in the top marginal rate of income tax for the country’s highest earners. [emphasis added]

   And…

Mr. Darling, presenting the budget, said that Britain was the victim of a worldwide recession and that the government, building “on the strengths of the British economy and its people,” would lead the country out of the slump with its deficit spending. He offered a hint of Labor’s plans for fighting the election with his announcement of a 50 percent top income tax rate beginning in 2010, up from the current top rate of 40 percent. In last year’s budget, Mr. Darling announced an increase to 45 percent that was to have begun in 2011, but the new plan supersedes that.

By government calculations, the 50 percent rate, for all those who earn more than £150,000 a year, about $216,750, will raise about $2.6 billion in additional revenues, a relatively small amount compared with the size of the deficits. To many critics, the new top rate, and other tax increases for high earners, suggested that Labor planned to emphasize its populist traditions and move away from the posture of the Blair years, when “New Labor” said it had turned away from its old hostility toward the wealthy.

   Now, there is some courage: raising the taxes on the elite to 50 percent, which begins to approach something reasonable. In our country, where the weathliest one percent have raked in–absconded?–staggering wealth over the past decade or two, we gag when the president suggests returning the rate on the elite to 39.5 percent–which I still consider too low. In our state, we have a governor who has lost his moral compass, preferring to send workers to the unemployment line or force average people to pay to use the subways (I’m guessing he, and most of the other electeds who prefer private car service, never uses the subway), rather than raise taxes in a significant way on the top one percent, which would eliminate, or sharply reduce to almost inconsequential, any fiscal deficit.

   Here’s a little silver lining–when people were outraged about France’s criticism of the Iraq War, some of our leading lights in the political class wanted to ban everything "French" (starting with the brilliant idea of forcing us to eat "Freedom Fries" instead…). Now, sacrificing French-related food was a heavy burden to consider (at least in the wine category). Can you point to anything British you would miss on your plate if we became more like them? Nope.

   So, let’s be more Brit-like…raise those taxes on the very rich in a meaningful way.