I’m getting increasingly pissed off about the debate about health care, and the larger obscenity that our states are collapsing, services are being cut, millions of people are losing jobs–and the richest Americans just can’t step out and say, "yes, we should pay more to have a decent society". If you want to see the incredible contradiction and obscenity played out right on the pages of one newspaper, you need go no further than The Wall Street Journal today (or, in the electronic edition as I choose to do).

   First, we read this (thanks to the Journal’s very good reporter, Ellen Schultz):

The nation’s wealth gap is widening amid an uproar about lofty pay packages in the financial world.

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.

Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures available. The compensation numbers don’t include incentive stock options, unexercised stock options, unvested restricted stock units and certain benefits.

   Get it–that chasm does not even include billions and billions of additional pay these highly-paid folks get.

   And, then, we read about the spineless political leaders in both parties who don’t have the courage to break the cycle of the destruction of a progressive taxation system and demand that the people who have done best in society give back a bit:

Democrats are considering scaling back proposed taxes on the rich, reconsidering taxing employer health benefits, and possibly trimming the total cost of the package to make subsidies for the uninsured less generous than advocates have sought.

   What the ***k? Where is the courage to say, "people, get a grip. We are asking you to pay a little bit more to repair our society…by the way, a little more that will end up helping you (in case you need a self-interested reason) because universal health care makes the economy healthier and will end up probably putting more money in your pocket".

   Of course, the only silver lining in this cowardly walking back on taxing the rich is that it simply shows how dumb it is, just on the economics, that we didn’t just have the fight to enact single-payer health care rather than mess around with inferior solutions.

   Where do we draw the line?