And you used to want to be a millionaire...

The NYTimes has been running a series of articles recently about the new wealth gap in America - the difference between the rich and the über-rich.

Consider the following: If you earn more than $330,000 a year, congratulations! You're in the top 1% of income earners (about one million households). This elite cadre earns an average of $940,000 a year. If you're lucky enough to be in the top 0.1%, chances are you earn $4.5 million per year. And if you somehow mangaged your way into one of the richest 10,000 households in America, you're earning an average of $20 million per year. Looking at the pay ratio of executives to employees is really pretty disgusting.

Now, I'm all for capitalism, but these people ain't Rockefeller or Carnegie. If today's wealthiest people founded oil or steel conglomerates, then maybe I'd have some respect for them. But today's super-rich aren't Ayn Rand's hallowed Producers. I can't even explain to you what they do. Quoth my favorite editorial board:

"America has long had a problem attracting enough well-trained people to important but not particularly well-compensated positions, like public defender, social worker or teacher. But an era in which a cancer researcher moves over into health-care management consulting because the pay is better — as Louis Uchitelle reported in The Times this week — is something else entirely."

Most people can explain why communism doesn't work: take away incentives to work, and people stop working. As pop culture has now absorbed, economics is the study of incentives. People need an incentive to work. I have no problem with entrepeneurs making it big - this is good for the economy. But when a man brings home $295 million for making his company's stock decline 7.7%, something has gone dreadfully wrong.

Here's a way to keep the compensation of the über-rich down, provide an incentive for corporate boards to reduce compensation packages, and do lots of good: taxes. Right now, Barry Diller is in the same tax bracket as someone making $320,000 a year - the 35% bracket. Let's return a 40% bracket for incomes over $300,000 (as in the good old Clinton days), and let's make a 45% bracket for incomes over $1.6 million and a 50% bracket for people earning more than $8 million - still enough for them to bring home over $4 million a year (before you gasp, don't forget about the 91% bracket in effect from WWII to 1964). How much additional money would this bring into federal coffers? According to my back-of-the-Excel-spreadsheet calculations: over $100 billion.

Or you could look at it this way: more than $2,000 for every American without health insurance, or perhaps $150,000 for every child born into poverty. And let's not forget that the US, with it's "culture of life," has a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba.

Still feel good about that tax cut you got?