The Providence Journal‘s very first editorial page of the year had an interesting juxtaposition concerning wealth and taxation.  On the left-hand page B10, Theodore Gatchel described the “fool me once” trick, using political trades of spending cuts for tax increases as an example:

… In 1982, President Reagan signed a bill in which the Democrats agreed to three dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar in tax hikes. The bill passed, the tax hikes followed immediately, but the spending cuts never materialized. Fool me once. 

President George H.W. Bush fell into a similar trap when he agreed to break his famous “Read my lips. No new taxes” promise in return for $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in taxes. Once again, the taxes were raised, but the promised spending cuts never came. Fool me twice.

Point being that it would be foolish to trust such a deal now, particularly with spending in such dire need of cuts.  The interesting juxtaposition comes with Clive Crook’s essay on the facing page.  Crook points out that the rich pay a higher percentage of the taxes that the U.S. government takes in than is the case in Europe, which he takes to be evidence that we don’t tax everybody else enough either.  He comes to that conclusion despite having just written:

In less than three decades, the 1 percent’s share of after-tax U.S. incomes more than doubled, from 8 percent to 17 percent. The change is not unique to the U.S. — inequality has increased almost everywhere — but the surge in the very highest incomes is especially startling in America.

So under the pattern (as described by Gatchel) in which neither government spending nor taxes ever go down, the very wealthy have been getting very wealthier.  The thread of causation from one observation to the other would be difficult to follow, indeed.  One could speculate that something in the evolving arrangement between the government and the people helped to insulate the upper class from competition, creating space, as Crook says, for “huge rewards for disastrous incompetence.”  Be that as it may, it’s a peculiar to hear Crook’s advice that liberals should cease to worry about inequality and adopt an agenda that includes “higher taxes on the rich — and higher taxes on the middle class as well.”

After all, “the rich can afford to be clever about tax shelters,” as he writes, while the middle class cannot.  If the system that brought us to our current state of inequality is the “fool me once,” increasing taxes across the board would be “fool me squared.”