Who is killing America's millionaires?
It hasn't been a good recession for the rich. The late boom was extraordinarily top-heavy, with the overwhelming majority of economic gains seemingly defying gravity and flowing to the top rung of the economic ladder.
Now those with the most assets and income have the most to lose. Add together the declining markets, an imploding finance sector, a real estate rot that has eaten its way up from the ground floor to the penthouse, and the predations of Bernie Madoff and Sir Allen Stanford, millionaires who ripped off other millionaires, and, as my Newsweek colleague Robert Samuelson notes, these are tough times for the wealthy.
As if market forces and malevolent actors weren't enough, the rich are now finding themselves targeted by politicians. Strapped for cash, states, cities, and the federal government are seeking to soak the rich -- or at least to make them pay taxes at the same marginal rates as they did in the Reagan years, which many on the right regard as an act equivalent to executing landed gentry. Some politicians have even suggested that we fund health care by slapping a surtax on people with annual incomes of more than $1 million.
This tactic isn't likely to work, in large part because people who make a lot of money are quite effective at swaying public policy.
What's more, the wealthy have many defenders who argue that taxing the golden geese will cause them to fly away. In May, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page argued that millionaires fled
