It’s a darn shame Robert Reich never had a paper route. He’s of the right age, as am I, but grew up privileged, which I did not. Though the son of an entrepreneur, he eschewed his roots and exited his adolescence into America’s hotbed of collectivism, the Ivy League.

It’d have done him good to be on his bike winging newsprint before dawn, I think… not to mention going door to door collecting subscription pledges.

Today, he spent his spare time as a professor at UC Berkeley (gosh, how to prioritize?!?!?) posting this blog entry, advocating a clever way to end that pesky capitalism once and for all! If the capitalists don’t like it, they can renounce their citizenship!

Taxing wealth-producers is not about class envy. It’s about the nation having enough money to pay for national defense and homeland security, empowering school unions and a crumbling infrastructure, large thriving government bureaucracies, the upcoming costs of boomers’ Social Security, and socialized medicine. Not to mention the trillion dollars or so it will take to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is now starting to hit the middle class.

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich (earning over $500,000 a year). Plus an annual wealth tax of one half of one percent on net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets. Can’t be done, you say? Well, the highest marginal tax rate under Republican Dwight Eisenhower was 91 percent. It dropped under JFK to the 70 percent range. You say the rich will leave the country rather than face a marginal tax of 50 percent? Let them, and take away their citizenship.

I have to admire his panache in simultaneously advocating the destruction (socialized medicine, “allowing” families to keep a thousand of each ten thousand they earn, etc., et al, ad nauseum) and salvation (”fixing the AMT” without reducing its overall enhancement of government revenue) of the middle class in the same paragraph.

And take away their citizenship? I think that will just increase the rate that top jobs move overseas.

Those who can’t do…

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