Greg Mankiw reminds us that popular opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, the rich pay more in taxes than do other income groups. And this, of course, is why serious efforts to cut taxes must include tax cuts for the rich (as Willie Sutton would say, that’s where the money is) and why “middle-class tax cuts” really don’t amount to all that much (as Willie Sutton would say, that’s where the money isn’t).

I really wish that more people would point this kind of thing out in debates over tax policy. Instead, the vast majority of commentators seems content to engage in class warfare and propagating sheer falsehoods that would have us believe that the further one goes up the income scale, the less one pays in taxes. I know that class warfare is a sort of comfort ideology but it leads to bad policymaking. One would have thought that bad policymaking would alarm some people, but apparently, that’s too much to hope for.