Guess what? The tax cut for the rich is actually for the rich! ...

Not to worry, any tax reduction Bush Jr. would propose wouldn't apply to you. Anybody that can only afford webtv certainly would fly below Republican radar.

They rarely are rewarded for their efforts. Compare, for example, a corn farmer with the Hilton daughters. Who produces more? The guy who feeds a nation but barely breaks even, or two spoiled brats whose major occupation seems to be snorting coke in the VIP room of New York nightclubs?

For the record, I supported Forbes' idea of the 7% flat tax. I voted for him in the primaries. Too bad it will never see reality. If the tax code was actually simple and understandable, then what would all those fresh faced accountants do? Why they'd have to find real jobs. The complexity of the tax code is work creation, nothing more.

I don't agree with Forbes' proposal for a flat income tax rate, but I agree with Roy on 'productive' versus 'non-productive' individuals.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, Gary Baldwin seems to be assuming that the nation's millionaires, because they're making more money than anyone else, must be more 'productive' than anyone else, and that middle class people who complain about the tax code being unfair, because they're making less money, must be 'non producers.'

This sounds like the Ayn Rand propaganda that I used to believe when I was 13 and 14 years old, and I found it very attractive once, but how realistic is it?

In Ayn Rand's novel 'The Fountainhead,' you get the impression that the great architect Howard Roark is the only 'producer' around, because he's this great intellectual giant. But in fact, a lot of carpenters, bricklayers, hod carriers, electricians etc. have to actually build all of the structures that Howard Roark designs.

And when he self-righteously blows up the building at the conclusion of the book because someone has dared to put some stupid gingerbread flourishes on his design, Roark is not just destroying what he's produced - he's destroying what the bricklayers, carpenters, hod carriers, electricians and daily laborers have produced, too.

It does against right-wing conservative ideology, which tends to hold that capitalist investors and business entrepreneurs are the only 'producers' because they're the people who deal in ideas, but in fact there are tens of millions of 'producers' in this country who perform middle-class jobs for reasonably low pay.

Construction workers, steel and auto workers, coal miners, convenience store clerks, bus drivers, office workers, service station attendants, office janitors, short order cooks and restaurant cooks, school teachers - there are tens of millions of people in this society who are 'producers' of important goods and services that all of us rely on for the good things in life.

And the Bush tax cuts, by primarily benefitting rich investors, are not helping these 'producers' at all, or at least not much.

Maybe the Bush tax cuts will help the innovators and inventors and entrepreneurs, who do 'produce' new ideas and new technologies that our society finds important. But without the work of the people who actually do the hard day-to-day work of putting the technologies and the ideas into practice, this kind of 'production' doesn't amount to

Why are we supposed to believe in the so-called 10% Rule? Who says that it's valid? The 10 percent who make the most money, I'd guess.