The proposed 5.6% surtax on millionaires, essentially the creation of a new tax bracket at the $1,000,000 income level, would raise enough money to pay for the American Jobs Act, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That pay-for will be used when the Senate attempts to pass a cloture vote this week on the bill.

Taxes need to be completely re-thought through the lens of what it takes to pay for the things society demands. What’s a priority (the social safety net) and what isn’t (imperial adventures). Who can pay and who can’t. If Democrats guard the rich, or near-rich if your prefer, because $250,000 a year “does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that is associated with wealth,” you’re just not going to close to a level of revenue that allows for the national priorities.

So much for the idea that there isn’t a specific policy message coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protests. This video, from the Institute for Policy Studies, which has been widely linked on the We Are the 99% Tumblr page, shows how easy it is to convert the frustrations of a generation of poor and disenfranchised people into action.

This millionaire’s minimum tax also seems like a clever way to eliminate the “carried interest” loophole, where income from money managers is taxed at the capital gains rate of 15% rather than the top marginal income rate of 35%.

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.

Tax policy that favors the rich has an enormous impact on public policy, with everything run through corporate and wealthy elites. In an impressive rant, Steven Pearlstein shows how this worked, with the rich creating the conservative monster and financing the radical movement which has relentlessly pushed the economy to the brink of disaster. So there’s definitely value in progressive taxation, even if that may not be true at this particular point in time. And when forced to choose between progressive taxation and spending cuts, it’s really no contest.

Two years ago, a concerted effort by a corporate-funded Tea Party movement to get conservatives out to town hall meetings changed the dynamic in Washington on health care reform and paved the way for the eventual House GOP takeover in the 2010 elections. In two separate work periods this year, ordinary citizens, with absolutely no help or encouragement from an organized progressive movement, have made their voices heard at town hall meetings, in particular by harassing conservative lawmakers about their plans to end Medicare and put forward a balanced budget amendment, as well as their opposition to tax fairness. If this organic movement were happening on the right, it would be front-page news in every national newspaper in the country. We know because the distinctly non-organic movement in 2009 was front-page news.

In order to find out about this movement, you have to go to local news sites.

Goldman Sachs may be a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money, but as macroeconomic analysts they’re usually pretty solid. Which makes sense, because macroeconomics smells a lot like money. But if you look retrospectively at their forecasts, they generally get things right. Which is why everyone should be pretty frightened by their most recent analysis.

Predictably, the budget framework that Barack Obama outlined quickly became used as the leftward pole in the debate. After all, Obama gave a partisan speech! He criticized Paul Ryan! So with the Obama plan on the left and the Ryan plan on the right, the range of debate had been narrowed artificially.

Washington exists to pay off the rich so we can give a crumb to everyone else. It’s a model of a government captured by oligarchs.