WaPost on Soaking the Rich to Pay for Health Care

The Washington Post came out this morning with an editorial criticizing Congressional Democrats plan to surcharge high earners in order to pay for the President's breathtaking expansion of government control of health care. The key sentence for me:

"Pretending that "the rich" alone can fund government, let alone the kind of activist government that the president and Congress envision, is bad policy any way you look at it. "

That said, the Post simply couldn't completely shake off its left of center biases--witness the tripe from the first paragraph:

"THERE IS a serious case to be made that the U.S. income tax system should become more progressive. The average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households shrank from 33 percent in 1986 to about 23 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of adjusted gross income claimed by that highest-earning sliver of American society doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. So, in principle, higher taxes for the well-heeled could make sense -- as part of a broader rationalization of the unduly complex tax code."

What the Post fails to mention is the significant increase in the share of total income taxes PAID by the top 1% in that time. While their rate may have fallen, their contributions as a part of the total have GREATLY increased.