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.

Oligarchs want to shift the burden of taxation onto someone else. NPR’s Adam Davidson wants you to know that is a great idea.

This is a very exciting step forward for married same-sex couples everywhere who seek to be treated the same as other married couples by our federal government.

There is justifiably a lot of angry attention drawn to the fact that Wisconsin didn’t really have a budget problem until Republican Governor Scott Walker artificially created one by rushing through a series of business tax cuts. Now, in a classic shock doctrine fashion, he is using this manufactured “crisis” to justify his push to cripple labor unions and cut the salaries of teachers.

While I find his behavior deplorable, it is important for grassroots progressive to keep in mind that what Gov. Walker is doing in Wisconsin is, in many ways, a small-scale version of what President Obama (with the help of Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell) has been overseeing at the federal level.

Responding to the Obama Administration’s apparent decision to cut Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding, Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute says that progressives “are losing the argument at a higher level” about the budget in general, putting all programs and services at risk.

Either Sen. Mitch McConnell is a dramatically better negotiator than President Obama or Obama lied about not wanting to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. McConnell’s superior skills of negotiation appear even more impressive given that he only controls a small minority in the Senate.

This is one step along the road to the Norquistian dream of endless low taxes, starving the government of revenue, and the necessary reaction to that of cutting services.

The bill will extend all the Bush tax cuts for two years, add an employee-side 2% cut to the payroll tax (about 1/3 of the employee responsibility), bring back the estate tax at a 35% level for estates over $5 million for two years, extend unemployment benefits for 13 months, enact a series of small business tax provisions on bonus depreciation and R&D, and extend a slew of other small tax breaks, including one for ethanol producers. All in all, the bill will cost $857 billion dollars over a two-year period. It will effectively raise taxes on 1 in 3 workers, those at the poorest end of the income scale making under $20,000 a year (or $40,000 for households), and will give a $139,000 tax cut to every millionaire in America.

A surprising start to the tax cut debate in the House; the leadership had to pull the bill from the floor before voting began. By all indications, they did not have enough votes to move forward on the rule. This is more like a temporary setback than a collapse of the tax cut deal, but we’ll keep monitoring it.

In a year when kids keep begging Santa for bare necessities for Christmas, the Walton family has been made even richer by Obama and Congress. And the thanks Congress and the American people get is higher prices for toys.