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A minimum-wage worker today must pay the FICA payroll tax of 15 percent (if you include the employer's share, as economists agree you should) on the very first dollar she earns. If she has children, she may qualify for an earned income tax credit, but she may not. If she works hard and moves up the income scale, she'll soon be paying another 15 percent in income tax. You might call this "double taxation," but President Bush doesn't.

Mr. Kinsley's logic here is comical. Mixing income taxes and FICA taxes serves his purpose in this case, but the reality is that FICA taxes are allocated to specific Federal entitlement programs. The hypothetical minimum-wage worker he describes sends her children to public schools (and they get free meals at school in the process), but she doesn't pay a nickel to the Department of Education. They enjoy the protection of the U.S. military, but she doesn't pay a nickel to the Department of Defense. Etc., etc., etc.

Of course, Kinsley can't look at it this way because the logical outcome of this kind of analysis would force him to conclude that the only "fair" tax system would require either the elimination of FICA taxes or a flat income tax for all workers.

So, under the American tax system as designed by the Bush administration and congressional Republicans, the most a person of vast wealth is expected to contribute to the commonweal from his or her last dollar of investment profits is the same 15 cents or so that a minimum-wage worker is expected to pay on his or her first dollar.

So a person who earns $10,000 contributes $1,500 "to the commonweal" (the "commonweal," as I have shown above, being nothing more than Social Security and Medicare), but a person who earns $1 million and doesn't contribute any more than $150,000 is somehow getting away with something?

"...a person who earns $1 million and doesn't contribute any more than $150,000 is somehow getting away with something?"

Yep. He's spreading his wealth to a whole bunch of hard-working yard workers, nannies, and cleaning people rather than to a single airplane ticket to Iraq for a traitor cwrongressmen. [or fill in your favorite democrap spending outrage]