President Obama, speaking yesterday in Annandale, Virginia:

we can ask millionaires and billionaires to make a little sacrifice. (Applause.)

We can't just tell the wealthiest among us, you don't have to do a thing. You just sit there and relax, and everybody else, we're going to solve this problem. Especially when we know that the only way to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans is by asking seniors to pay thousands of dollars more for their health care, or cutting children out of Head Start, or doing away with health insurance for millions of Americans on Medicaid -- seniors in nursing homes, or poor children, or middle-class families who may have a disabled child, an autistic child.

This is not a trade-off that I'm willing to make.

Monday's post on the New Yorker's George Packer accusing congressional Republicans of being "willing to deploy legislative terrorism" to get their way drew the following comment:

I went to the New Yorker's on-line forum with Mr. Packer on this article. Here's my question and his response:

Comment From Andrew

Was it really necessary to use the term "legislative terrorism" in your article? Does that really add to the debate?

Amity Shlaes has a tax column up at Bloomberg News:

In 1980, the top 1 percent of earners paid 19 percent of income taxes, and the bottom half of earners paid 7.1 percent. A decade later, with a lower maximum rate, the top 1 percent paid 25 percent of taxes, while the bottom earners paid just 5.8 percent. By 2008, top earners paid 38 percent of taxes, the bottom half 2.7 percent....

tax sanctimony gets in the way of tax reform. In a progressive rate structure, the rich almost always get bigger tax cuts, because their rates are higher to begin with. So their cuts sound unfair. The more progressive a tax structure, the more unfair its dismantlement appears.

The reality is that this year in tax terms, the U.S. isn't a sinner. The country is already clean. The very rich shoulder far more of the collective burden than their share in the population warrants.

It looks like one of the tickets to a Pulitzer Prize is having one's work criticized on FutureOfCapitalism. Congratulations to the winners announced yesterday afternoon. They include:

George Packer, writing in the New Yorker:

The Republicans now hold just one house of Congress, yet they have controlled the terms of the debate, because they understand that budget battles are about far more than numbers, and they've made the ideology behind their various bargaining positions startlingly clear: government should be reduced to gasping for air. What's more, they're willing to deploy legislative terrorism—threatening to shut down the government and to allow the United States to default on its debt—to get their way.

"Terrorism"?

And here I had thought President Obama was willing to shut down the government to assure that Planned Parenthood kept its funding.

Might it be possible for a writer in the New Yorker to disagree with Republicans about the federal budget without calling them terrorists? Remember, had the Democrats passed appropriations bills for the year ahead when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, this whole "shutdown" wouldn't have even been an issue.

The United Kingdom's Adam Smith Institute notices that "republican" — i.e., anti-monarchist — protest has essentially been banned from the upcoming royal wedding, and calls that a shame.

The item goes on to argue that while in theory there isn't much theoretical support for the idea of constitutional monarchy, in practice, "the record of modern constitutional monarchies has been a good one for tolerance, for the rights of dissenting minorities to do their own thing, and for upholding the rule of law and the rights of free speech."

The Adam Smith Institute doesn't give a list of the "modern constitutional monarchies" it is using as a sample, but it's got to be a pretty short list, and it may be that the countries on it share some other qualities in common.

Somehow I missed this one last week, but Fox News and the Heritage Foundation are both making some hay of it: As a senator, in 2006, Barack Obama voted against raising the debt limit. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, now says the president thinks that vote was a "mistake." Here's how Heritage puts it:

From Clive Crook's column in the Financial Times: "One of the few drawbacks of residing in the US is the annual encounter with Form 1040, which is to personal finance as waterboarding is to asking some questions."

Link via Economic Policies for the 21st Century.

Architect John Gillis, writing about the post here earlier about the 17-year-long, $476 million renovation of a 490,941 square foot federal courthouse and post office in Brooklyn, New York:

476 million dollars divided by the 490,000 sf of space, results in a $971 per square foot cost for these renovations. In today's dollars, if I spent, as an architect, more than $500. per square foot on a NEW high end office building for one of the richest corporations in America, I would be overspending. And renovations usually only cost a portion of what it takes to build new buildings.

This is a remarkable misuse of funds by the government.

When the Wall Street Journal editorialized last week, "According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn't cover Mr. Obama's deficit for this year," FutureOfCapitalism questioned the numbers in a posting here. I wrote:

The signs at the site of federally funded construction at the federal bankruptcy courthouse and post office in downtown Brooklyn have President Obama's name at the top and in larger letters than anything else, along with the "recovery" logo that looks familiarly like the Obama campaign logo. Maybe I'm overreacting, but this strikes me as the sort of thing you might see from a local politician or a third-world dictator, not the president of the United States. Everyone knows he's the president of the United States, after all. Is it really necessary to plaster his name in enormous letters on signs adorning a construction site, as if the work were funded by him personally rather than by the taxpayers or the Congress?

Economic Policies for the 21st Century has posted a transcript of its event yesterday with Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, responding to the president's budget speech. It turns out that Mr. Ryan and a couple of other senior house Republicans actually were in the room for the president's speech, which may explain why the president didn't mention by name the members of Congress who were in attendance. Highlights from Mr. Ryan's remarks:

I forgot whose quote this was. Maybe it was Churchill. But he was basically a pyromaniac in a field of straw men....

Here's what we're basically saying. We're saying let's keep government spending basically where it has been historically as a share of our economy. For the last 40 years, we've basically taken 20 cents out of every dollar made in America to pay for the federal government. Well, this is the path we're on. This is the path the President keeps us on.

The Atlas Shrugged movie opens this weekend. Our review is here: "the film was great."

Other views: The American Enterprise Institute's Joy Pullman has a scathingly negative take. Donald Luskin has an appreciative piece in the Wall Street Journal reporting, "Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) insists that all his staffers read 'Atlas Shrugged.'"

The New York Times has run two corrections in a week (here and here) about the Koch brothers.

USA Today reports: "Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010, the lowest rate since 1983 and down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000. Last year, just 66.8% of men had jobs, the lowest on record."