This is via The Rachel Maddow Show: the very white male House Republican leadership.

Longtime reader and author James McCollough sent me to an amazing article at AlterNet by Laura Gottesdiener, A Year in Jail for Not Believing in God? How Kentucky Is Persecuting Atheists. I don’t think of myself as an atheist especially; although I do self-identify as one, I think it gives an entirely incorrect idea of where I stand on matters spiritual. But this article is an outrage and shows one reason why I have no respect for the conservative Christian movement in this country.

The Kentucky law states that their Homeland Security building must have plaques in front of it claiming how we are only really secure thanks to God. The plaques read in part, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” And if some bureaucrat doesn’t install these plaques, he faces up to a year in jail. This law was taken to the Kentucky state Supreme Court, which upheld it.

This law seems clearly unconstitutional. But frankly, I’m not at all sure that the current US Supreme Court would agree. At this point, we seem to have 4 political hacks on the court who might as well have been elected by the Tea Party. One thing is for sure: if this case does go to the US Supreme Court, some of the justices will vote to uphold. And that is a sad testament to the state of our “justice” system.

What I’m most interested in here is the triviality of the conception of the people who are behind this law. The idea here is of a God as some supreme being. Yet even the most trivial understanding of theology indicates that God can’t be just another thing. If that were the case then it wouldn’t be a god at all, but rather just a being more powerful than we are. An example would be the way we relate to ants: we have almost unlimited power over ants, but we certainly aren’t the reason that ants exist.

I understand that for many people, that last bit was pretty theoretical and metaphysical, so let me take a big step back into reality. The idea of a “personal god” is not only stupid, it is repellent. What it says is people always deserve their suffering. The poor deserve to be poor. The rich deserve to be rich. To state the same thing in a way that relates to our recent elections: rape victims deserve the babies of their rapists.

Consider earthquakes. Few people die as a result of them in the United States, but in 2010, over 300,000 Haitians died as a result of just one. (The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California was the same size and killed 63 people—most from the collapse of a single road: the Cypress Structure.) If God took a personal interest in the lives of humans, how could he possibly allow this? Is it that Americans are just more moral than Haitians? Or is it more likely that in the United States we have wealth and building codes that protect us? The Kentucky Homeland Security building exists as a kind of tribute to the more than 3,000 people who died on 11 September 2001. Surely many of those people were righteous. God did not save them because God, regardless of what it is, does not do that kind of thing.

So you can take your pick of reasons to be appalled by the Kentucky entire government: executive, legislative, and judicial. But it all comes down to the same thing: Kentucky is embarrassing the rest of the nation. They are also embarrassing believers and spiritual seekers in general. And all for what? To make a statement against atheists? And this is in response to an attack by a group very much like themselves: ignorant true believers in the God of their fathers? Each day I despair more for our nation.

This morning Paul Krugman posted an article, The Stiffs and the Players. This is a reference to a speech by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. In it, he explains to Bud what they are working for. He says that Bud doesn’t want to be some Well Street working stiff making $400,000 per year and flying first class. Bud should want to be rich enough to own his own jet—to be rich enough to not waste time.

Krugman mentions this in reference to the idea by Nate Silver and Josh Marshall that what the Republicans are trying to do in the budget negotiations is to protect the very wealthy at the expense of the “simply” wealthy. In other words: protect the jet owners at the expense of the first class travelers. And he presents a graph that demonstrates this.

On one level, I don’t particularly care: I’m not shedding any tears for any of these people. On another level, this is just wrong. But it is nothing new. For a long time, I’ve been talking about the fact that with our tax system we fuck the “simply” wealthy compared to the very wealthy. Someone who makes about a half million dollars per year probably pays around 30% in federal income taxes. But someone who makes $20 million pays only 15%.

You would think that this would create a class war between these two groups, but for whatever reason it doesn’t. I think a lot of it is that the rich are just as ignorant as anyone else. The caller to Sam Seder’s show is a good example. I suspect that this kind of guy votes reliably Republican, even while the party consistently puts his interests aside for the interests of the really wealthy.

As I’ve said before, I currently think it would be good to create two more marginal tax rates. For the rate above $250k up to $500k: 40%. For $500k up to $1m: 45%. And for income over $1 million: 50%. And as usual, bring the Social Security tax cap way up: $250k or higher. And finally, raise the capital gains rate up to the “work for a living” rate, or at least implement something like the Buffett Rule or a new AMT.

This is not only good for our economy and our society, it is much more fair to the “simply” rich. True: it does require that they pay more in taxes. But this is about shared sacrifice—what these kinds of people are always calling for. Well, this is what true shared sacrifice looks like. Shared sacrifice is not the rich (who’ve gained 93% of the economic gains of the recovery) paying for half of the budget shortfall. This is only shared sacrifice in the entitled minds of the wealthy. The poor and middle class who have seen almost no gains during the last 30 years of productivity gains have already paid enough. It is time for the rich to pay their fair share. And that necessarily means that the very wealthy much pay a lot more.