Millman contemplates tax rates on the wealthy. His bottom line:
The most anti-tax people I know are small business owners and Wall Street traders. These people, in my experience, work very long hours. They don’t really have the choice to work shorter hours – working long hours is part of the package. Many of these people are “sprinting.” They are working so hard to get to a particular level of wealth. They may not get there – but there is a destination. And they don’t want anybody putting obstacles in their way. They have a reason for hating high taxes that is not shared by people who are already at a high level of wealth, nor by people who do not have a reasonable prospect of getting to that level of wealth.
If you raised taxes on these people, they would be angry. They couldn’t “work less” – as I say, that’s usually not an option. But they could do something else to earn a living, and give up on the dream of “sprinting” to wealth. The more sophisticated version of the anti-tax case, then, claims that these “sprinters” generate substantial positive externalities for society from their activity.
Romney’s national security spokesman, was not introduced by name as part of the Romney team at the beginning of the call, and his voice completely absent from the conversation. Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up. Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up. Their response to the far right fooferaw was simply to go silent, to keep Grenell off-stage and mute, and to wait till the storm passed. But the storm was not likely to pass if no one in the Romney camp was prepared to back Grenell up. Hence his dilemma. The obvious solution was simply to get Grenell out there doling out the neocon red meat – which would have immediately changed the subject and helped dispel base skepticism. Instead the terrified Romneyites shut him up without any actual plan for when he might subsequently be able to do his job. To my mind, it’s a mark of his integrity that he decided to quit rather than be put in this absurd situation. And it’s a mark of Romney’s fundamental weakness within his own party that he could not back his spokesman against the Bryan Fischers and Matthew Francks. I’m with 
The Dish 
