Here are some poll questions that I’d like you to consider:

1. If you knew that taking a deep breathe would kill you, would you inhale?

2. If picking your nose caused cancer, would you allow you child to ever go digging for that gold?

3. If George Steinbrenner was a left-wing Democrat, would you be willing to root for the Yankees?

   Okay, so maybe the last question wouldn’t influence you at all but now consider this question posed in a recent The New York Times poll about Barack Obama’s tax plan:

Mr. Obama’s push to increase income taxes on people making over $250,000 a year was supported by 74 percent of respondents. When presented with the possibility that taxing those in the higher income bracket might hurt the economy, 39 percent of those polled still backed the plan. [emphasis added]

   The poll question is as idiotic as the questions I posed. There is no evidence–ZERO, NADA, NONE–that the president’s plan to *minimally* raise the taxes on the highest income earners–returning the top rate to the Clinton era 39.5 percent–would do anything to hurt the economy. And, in fact, the sky-high number supporting the proposal shows that people understand this.

   But, injecting a completely foolish question with absolutely no economic data supporting it in the real world is part of the conventional wisdom that continues to course through the political discourse. That is, that somehow a more progressive tax system would injure the economy.

   In fact, the real question, which has far more data to support it, should have been: if President Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on those people making more than $250,000 helped the economy by closing the divide between rich and poor, eased the funding of investments in energy, education and other critical projects and reduce the fiscal deficit, would you support the proposal? I would guess the 74 percent number would rise to be somewhere north of 90 percent.

   This may seem like a small point. But, beyond the fights over this budget item or that budget item, I think the larger ideological, framing battle is still before us: to drive a stake through the heart of the many decades of economic rhetoric coming from the failed free-market ideology who eviscerated a sane approach to sharing the burden of having a decent society i.e., a progressive tax system.