Double taxation? The president sheds tears for millionaires allegedly subjected to it, while many ordinary Americans suffer triple taxation without a word of sympathy from the White House.

Donald Barlett and James Steele write about that inequity in Time this week. Barlett and Steele are the dogged economic populists who wrote the 1992 bestseller America: What Went Wrong? In the article they also give examples of potential windfalls for the rich from an elimination of the tax on dividends (the family of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton: $187 million), and they point out the extraordinarily regressive nature of the Social Security tax (everything above $87,000 a year is exempt from the tax, so middle-income workers pay it on every dime, while CEOs with seven- and eight-figure salaries pay it on only a small fraction of what they make).

Don't plead innumeracy. Just read the article and get angry.

(Some of what B&S say will be familiar to those familiar with this much-discussed New York Times article -- together, the two articles help explain why we have an essentially flat tax rate, when all forms of taxation are taken into account, as this chart shows, despite our progressive income tax.)