“How is the government going to get the extra taxes? Out of the rich -- or just out of the poor, as usual?”

Something the tax and spend liberals forget -- the rich and powerful run the government -- stop giving them the power to tax the rest of us!! The poor always end up paying more than anyone else -- that is the intent!

And isn't it astounding that there are actually people in America who imagine and dream that one day they too will be rich, so in the meantime support the political policies that will certainly keep them from ever being so.

Its not the so called "tax & spend liberals" that are the problem... it is the radical religious right who sold us out to King George W, who in turn sold us all out to corporate America.

Rodgers was a good man, and it is good that he died before the rise of the welfare state. This quote is totally irrelevant today, like the opinions of most economically, politically, historically and militarily IGNORANT AMERICANS. The top 5% pay 53.25% of all income taxes, the top 10% pay 64.89%, the top 25% pay 82.9%, and the top 50% pay 96.03% The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.97% of all income taxes. The top 1% is paying more than ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50%! And who earns what? The top 1% earns 17.53 of all income, the top 5% earns 31.99 the top 10% earns 43.11%, the top 25% earns 65.23%, and the top 50% earns 86.19% of all the income. But more important is who gets the government dole: America’s lowest-earning one-fifth of households (Under $23,700) receives roughly $8.21 in government spending for each dollar of taxes paid. Households with middle-incomes ($42,305–$65,000) receive $1.30 per tax dollar, and America’s highest-earning households (Over $99,502) receive $0.41 per tax dollar. John Weicher, as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank, wrote in his February 13, 1997 Washington Post Op-Ed, "Most of the rich have earned their wealth... Looking at the Fortune 400, quite a few even of the very richest people came from a standing start, while others inherited a small business and turned it into a giant corporation." What's happening here is not that "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." Beware the noise of a decrier of wealth, it is the lepers bell of the approaching looter! Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

Reston is right as usual. But it's not only the religious crazies that are the problem, it's the success of the rich and powerful in controlling the minds of men such as are represented by the comments here through control of the media and of history books. A very bright historian wrote, "....if you can control history, what people know about it, if you can decide what's in people's history and what's left out, you can order their thinking. You can order their values. You can in effect organize their brains by controlling their knowledge. The people who can do that, who can ontrol the past, are the people who control the present." And, boy, these comments prove that.

What everyone forgets is that each of us thinks we're the poor, or at least the middle class, when government knows that we're all the evil rich.

Wow Helorat, lots of statistics, from where? Since Will's time those on welfare have learned to not work but take as much as they can from the rest of us.

It seems most people forget that the United States is based on Capitalism, not a Democracy. Why anyone in a Capitalist society would complain about corporations running a Capitalist country and it's politicians is beyond me. If you cannot tolerate Capitalism and corporate greed, then do something about it. Curiously, the 60's "Flower Power" generation, which was so against the "establishment" and the wars of their parents (Viet Nam), now behave even worse giving their own wars in Iraq an Afghanistan and the "me" society, and an even greater "establishment". Hypocrites!

Liberty once lived, nothing compares ! Even the poor rich man through equitable exchange seeks enlightenment from the wealthy poor man. Envy not the rich, if thou be a wealthy poor man.

Bobby, the de jure States united was almost described to a founding individual as antithetical to a democracy. Instead of Capitalism or corporatism (Mussolini coining the phrase: fascism), the overall outlining or framing of the body politic was to ensure a laissez faire free market economy. At a most primitive foundation at law, corporations are extensions of the State (by definition, corporations running - or having a major influence - in any nation's government is a fascist form of socialism).

As to the quote, the originating body politic of the de jure States united was to be a grouping of servants, hired to protect and administer individual sovereign rights. The occupying statist theocracy now infesting this land enslaves a once free people of a proposed land of liberty (long since gone) through an unlawfully (at natural law) economic system of debt. Taxes are a facade to control the enslaved chattel. Extra taxes only serves to add extra power to enslaving control - on bot rich and poor (the poor always being the most grievously controlled).