The Obama budget is proposing to tax dividends for high-income taxpayers as ordinary income. This is not a change on capital gains, it’s on dividends, the money earned through corporate payouts of profits to shareholders. The capital gains tax rate would rise to 20% from 15% under the Obama proposal, consistent with prior years.

The ABC News report that came out last night about “Mitt Romney’s offshore tax havens” appears to get the data wrong, so you end up with a muddled analysis of the situation. What is actually happening here, as Pat Garofalo untangles, is that Romney invests in funds from his old company Bain Capital that happen to park their money offshore to avoid taxes.

MItt Romney, who’s been pressed to release his tax returns, effectively conceded today that since most of his income in the last ten years comes from capital gains, his effective tax rate was “closer” to the 15 percent on capital gains, one of the main factors driving America’s income inequality. He then argued that rate should not be reduced or eliminated because of budget impacts.

The Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, provide an object lesson on income inequality. The math is pretty stark. This one family holds as much wealth as the bottom 30% of all Americans.

I have to agree with The Economist that this policy is trivial, even if you agree (as I do) with the component parts. “Our economy is riddled with a multitude of deeply-embedded structural flaws that allow the well-connected to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but nobody will do anything about it.” And yes, that was on the website of The Economist.

The biggest reason why you would want to use higher taxes on the rich and the nation’s largest corporations if you’re going to pay for stimulative job-creation measures is not just because these would be the least disruptive offsets for an economy waiting to heal. Just as high on the list is the fact that low taxes on the ultra-rich distorts the economy and makes future growth nearly impossible.

A perfect example of this comes from the Washington Post’s salutary article today on capital gains taxes. This is something that hardly even gets talked about anymore, but it’s at the heart of at least one of the pay-fors on the White House’s list, the carried interest loophole. The only reason that hedge fund managers are paying drastically lower tax rates is because the taxes on their capital gains, which they are calling their entire income, is drastically lower than the income tax. And this has produced massive inequality, pushed along by the rich contributors of politicians in both parties.