As is typically the case after a high-profile murder, people are speculating about suspect Luigi Mangione’s state of mind when he allegedly killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Hilton hotel in Manhattan.

We have a likely (political) motive in the form of a handwritten statement Pennsylvania police say they found on Mangione when they arrested him. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” it reads. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the (indecipherable) largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No, the reality is, these (indecipherable) have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. … It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Thompson’s death immediately prompted the widespread assumption that his killer had to have been motivated by something personal. The CEO must have been the victim of a vengeful patient, or someone who loved and lost a person to an insurance denial. There are, after all, numerous Americans whom United Healthcare refuses to cover for medical treatment. Some die. But the man they arrested doesn’t fit the bill. Though Mangione’s social media feeds indicate that he had major back surgery following an injury, the operation appears to have been successful. There is no evidence that an insurance company denied his claim. United Healthcare says Mangione has never been their customer.

This looks like a case of self-radicalization.

Mangione was privileged and high functioning. If he can become a one-man terrorist group, anyone can.

The establishment press can’t wrap its collective head around it.

Writing in The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells is among the many journalists who wondered aloud: “We’ve seen the video of him shouting at the press as he’s pulled into the courthouse, which suggests perhaps some disquiet. But we also haven’t heard from anybody who interacted with him at any point in his life who found him anything but levelheaded, cleareyed, calm and even kind.” Why might someone with Mangione’s background (white, well off, Ivy educated), looks (women have been swooning over him online) and social currency (he was friendly and popular) stalk a business executive he’d never met and gun him down?

Perhaps, some reports suggested, back pain from spondylolisthesis drove him insane. Or that pain made it impossible for him to have sex and that made him nuts. Or his turn to violence was inspired by Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto. He was 26, the average age when schizophrenia first manifests — maybe a mental time bomb was behind his psychotic break. One of these explanations may prove true. Or none. Mangione may be sane. He may simply be a class traitor.

Wallace-Wells continued: “In many ways, the obvious explanation is that the attack was the result of some kind of breakdown. But aside from the shooting itself, we haven’t seen any real signs of a breakdown.” (Except for shouting at the press. Wallace-Wells thinks that makes you unwell.)

Interesting questions arise from the assumption that mental illness is “the obvious explanation.” We are going to have to radically rethink our society if that’s true.

Are prison employees who administer capital punishment insane? What about combat troops who kill enemy soldiers whom they have nothing against personally, simply because they’re given an order? Are members of the military lunatics? Must one be crazy to serve as president, a job that involves ordering men and women to shoot and bomb other people — sometimes en masse — and signing off on extrajudicial assassinations, as with drones? Harry Truman dropped The Bomb. Was he psycho? What of a police officer who shoots a suspect? If a health insurance company unfairly denies lifesaving medical care to a patient and the patient dies, which one can argue is tantamount to murder, does that make a CEO like Thompson a murderer too — and therefore insane?

If everyone who kills a human being is psychotic, shouldn’t every killer be granted an insanity defense and automatically be sent to a psychiatric facility rather than prison?

What about farmers who kill animals? Vets who euthanize them?

When Marianne Bachmeier entered a West German courtroom in 1981 and shot to death the man who raped and murdered her 7-year-old daughter, there was no confusion. Everyone understood her motivation. It was personal and relatable, and therefore there was no talk that she might be bonkers.

Should it turn out that Mangione’s motive was personal, and that he or someone he cared about suffered pain at the hands of the health insurance industry, the discomfort of the chattering classes would be mitigated. Oh. That makes sense.

It is possible, though — likelier, really — that Mangione engaged with the question of America’s for-profit health care system impersonally and intellectually yet passionately. Like those who marched against the Vietnam and Gaza wars despite having no personal stake in the conflict, it is hard not to feel disgust and outrage when one hears horrific accounts of insurance companies denying and delaying valid claims as they rake in billions. Mangione had to have known, as everyone does, that there is no prospect of health care reform coming out of a Washington in which neither political party wants to fix the system.

People kill other people in service to far more abstract concepts than affordable health care. Political leaders kill over such dubious controversies as arbitrary borders and the domino theory and NATO expansion and the Shia-Sunni schism, yet nobody thinks they’re insane.

Murder, all societies agree, is wrong — unless it’s committed by someone officially authorized to take life. Vigilantism is problematic because, taken to its logical extreme, the rule of law would collapse.

Dismissing a vigilante’s actions as the product of an unsound mind, however, thoughtlessly brushes off the question of why he feels compelled to resort to an act so drastic that it will probably end his own life as well. When one is confronted with massive suffering and heinous injustice, when society doesn’t offer a legal mechanism to stop these horrors, is it inherently insane to say to yourself, “someone should do something”? Or to conclude, “if the answer is yes, why not me?”

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

The arrest of a suspect in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan leaves some questions unanswered. But the gleeful reaction to the executive’s slaying leaves nothing subject to interpretation. Many Americans feel they have been treated so shabbily by the health insurance industry that they despise it and want its leaders to die — and they’ve been willing to say so loudly and publicly.

I’m 61. I can’t recall the demise of any public figure being greeted with as much glee and dark humor, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. Which makes psychological sense. If someone is trying to kill you, you hate them.

Health insurance companies are trying to kill us.

While Americans were shocked and some even traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, most individuals didn’t feel personally threatened, much less harmed, by al-Qaeda. On the other hand, an insurer like United, which is reported to deny a whopping 32% of in-network claims, wields the power to overrule doctor’s orders, harass sick people at their most vulnerable and, given the sky-high health costs in this country, put medical treatment — the ultimate nondiscretionary expense — out of reach. Rare is the health insurance customer who can’t tell a horror story of being unfairly turned down for reimbursement for a doctor’s visit or procedure, usually after being given the runaround over preauthorizations, procedural codes, doctors erroneously listed as in network, and other Soviet-style nonsense.

Sometimes health insurers decide that people — people like you — shouldn’t receive lifesaving care. Patients die every year due to the health insurance industry’s sinister profit model, which heavily relies upon quotas for automatic — or, in many cases, automated — denials.

Even when health insurance works as advertised, it feels like a scam. You pay a monthly premium, yet even when you have a legitimate claim, you probably won’t be able to collect a reimbursement due to high deductibles that can exceed $10,000 a year. Insurers’ online directories of in-network health providers are years out of date; most of the doctors listed no longer accept the company’s insurance (or never did), have moved their practices or are retired or deceased. “In a 2023 analysis, researchers surveyed nearly 450,000 physicians in the Medicare provider database that appeared in online physician directories for UnitedHealth, Elevance, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana,” Jacobin reported. “They found that only 19 percent had consistent addresses and specialty information across all the directories in which they were found.” (Failing to keep these lists up to date is illegal under the 2022 No Surprises Act, but the federal law is not enforced.)

There ought to be more difference between the experience of being uninsured and paying for insurance.

Health insurance companies create misery that feels intensely personal. The fact that a procedure or medication ordered by your physician, whom you know and has examined you personally, can be overruled by an anonymous individual who has never laid eyes upon you in a completely opaque process can be maddening. Insurers want to make more money and are willing to let you and your loved ones suffer great pain, and perhaps even death, in order to maximize revenues.

“Our role is a critical role, and we make sure that care is safe, appropriate, and it’s delivered when people need it,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty reassured employees in an internal video following Thompson’s killing. “We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable.” He hasn’t learned a thing.

This, of course, is bullshit. Companies like UnitedHealthcare are leeches, a net negative to the patient experience. No one believes they are “guarding” us against any danger whatsoever. They aren’t fighting “complexity”; they are the complexity. They add an additional, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy between sick people and health care providers, with only one goal: profits.

The obvious solution is to abolish the medical insurance industry and join the 69% of the world’s population that has some form of universal health care. For the foreseeable future, however, massive donations by the health insurance lobby both to Democrats and Republicans make it highly unlikely that something like Medicare for All, popular among voters of both parties, will be enacted anytime soon.

Still, the staggering hatred by health insurance consumers for the current system creates a political opportunity for the politician or party willing to push through three simple reforms to protect health insurance consumers from the industry’s most predatory practices.

First, if a physician is listed as a member of a health insurance company’s network, an insured patient’s experience should be frictionless. In network, no claim for a visit, test, procedure or medication should ever be denied. Preauthorizations should never be required.

Second, if an insurer believes one of its network member physicians is overprescribing or otherwise abusing the system, the dispute should be resolved between the insurance company and the doctor. An insurer can sue a rogue doctor, kick them out of their network, whatever, but leave sick patients out of it.

Third, failure to update lists of in-network physicians should inconvenience the insurance company that fails to fulfill its responsibilities and comply with federal law, not those of us seeking medical care. We deserve truth in advertising. If an insurer lists a doctor as being in-network on their website or elsewhere, patients should be reimbursed for visiting that doctor under the doctrine.

As President-elect Donald Trump formulates his policies for his second term, I hope his powerful instinct when it comes to gauging public opinion has taken note of our hatred of the for-profit health insurance industry. Pushing through these three reforms would enjoy bipartisan support and begin to fulfill his pledge to fix the badly broken American health care system.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

As Democrats survey their recent losses in the election, they should avoid drawing conclusions or floating prescriptions for fixing their party’s problems. First, they should absorb the biggest data point that is currently being ignored by both the progressive and the corporatist wings of the party: They haven’t really won a presidential election since 2012. No, 2020 doesn’t count. Not really. Read on.

Democrats don’t yet recognize it, but they have effectively messed up three consecutive elections against Donald Trump. This points less to a divided country wobbling back and forth between two parties than to a systemic realignment in favor of the Republicans. For Democrats, this suggests a serious set of systemic problems unlikely to be fixable by nipping and tucking messaging and candidate presentation.

I am not an election denialist. Trump officially lost in 2020. But Joe Biden, doddering even at the time as he campaigned from his basement, didn’t really win.

COVID-19 shaped that race in two significant ways. Trump committed political suicide in both. Trump’s unforced errors in 2020 were so easily foreseen and so bizarre that it’s hard to imagine another candidate ever committing political malpractice to such an extreme. Of course Democrats were able to beat him then.

It was a weird election.

First, Trump shot himself in both feet with Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership launched between March and May 2020, at the start of the lockdown. Epidemiologists and ordinary citizens alike fantasized about developing a vaccine, but experts cautioned that it would take ages. “Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months,” The New York Times reported on April 30, 2020. “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years — more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.”

“Never succeed” succeeded. Relying on emergency use authorizations and conditional approvals, the first vaccines became available to the public starting Dec. 11, 2020. By April, anyone who wanted one could get one — a mere year after Warp Speed began.

This was a miracle. A study by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that the vaccines prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans. They saved the budget $1.15 trillion through November 2022.

Fast action to develop vaccines, something a more conventional politician like his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton might have been hesitant to approve without additional testing prior to approval, was Trump’s greatest accomplishment during his first term. Best of all from a political standpoint, timing made it the mother of all October surprises — had Trump chosen to run with it. The president could have informed a traumatized electorate a few weeks before Election Day that they would be inoculated against the deadly coronavirus not four or more years in the future but in mere weeks or months.

Insanely, Trump ran away from his big win. To be sure, Trump did announce that vaccines were on the way. But he did so in an uncharacteristically muted manner. His highest-profile and highest-volume pandemic messaging, influenced by his wacky supporters and political allies, many of whom subscribed to unorthodox medical views, including being opposed to vaccination or believing that COVID-19 was a hoax, deteriorated into an incoherent morass that understated the impact, including the number of deaths. “That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television — ‘COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.’ A plane goes down. Five hundred people dead, they don’t talk about it,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Oct. 24, 2020. “COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.’ By the way, on Nov. 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.” On Oct. 26, he continued to downplay the scale of the pandemic as a “Fake News Media Conspiracy,” saying the U.S. had the most cases on Earth only because “we TEST, TEST, TEST.”

Thanks in large part to Trump, however, COVID-19 vaccines were the fastest ever created. Due to internal GOP politics, however, Trump felt compelled to run away from Operation Warp Speed and, in doing so, threw away his best issue. An October 2020 Reuters-Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on his handling of the coronavirus crisis, with 37% approving and 59% disapproving. It was as though Franklin Roosevelt had denied having anything to do with the New Deal when he ran for reelection in 1936 and gotten dinged for making the Depression worse.

Similarly inexplicable and tied to the vagaries of paranoid right-of-center internecine discussions, Trump repeatedly advised his supporters not to cast an early vote before Election Day or vote by mail, alternatives that exploded in popularity due to the pandemic lockdown, on the grounds that they were rife with fraud. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020. “And, you know, when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple — whether they counterfeit them, forge them, do whatever you want. It’s a very serious problem,” he said in September 2020.

Forty-six percent of ballots were cast via early or mail-in voting in 2020, double the result for four years earlier. But only 62% of Trump voters voted early or by mail, compared to 82% for Biden.

It was an incredibly stupid mistake. It wasn’t one that the Trump campaign repeated this year.

Democrats convinced themselves that their 2016 loss was a fluke attributable to sexism, Russian interference and the novelty of Trump, celebrity and TV star, as their opponent. They took comfort in the fact that Trump had been defeated in 2020 and therefore possibly would be again.

What they failed to grasp is that the real anomaly here was 2020. Had Trump exploited the triumph of Operation Warp Speed and encouraged his supporters to cast early and mail-in ballots — any vote, any time, is a good vote — he would almost certainly have beaten Biden. They foolishly assumed Trump learned nothing from his previous campaign, that he would not correct his mistakes.

For the first time since 1892, we now have a presidential candidate who ran in three consecutive elections, largely on the same issues, the border and the economy. Trump won twice and lost once, but that once was due to his suicidal moves. Whatever Democrats decide to do to try to become stronger and more viable going forward, they need to understand that they haven’t had a strong enough candidate to beat a real Republican running a normal campaign in a conventional presidential campaign since Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by — especially by — those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)

One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization, as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.

Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free health care cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.

Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that — we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: Humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.

Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least 3% to 6% organic matter. But 40% of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over 9 billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits — an essential move toward saving ourselves — there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.

Thirty percent of the world’s commercially fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions — or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.

So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to 10% of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.

“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan’s empire chomped its way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.

A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a 6% chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100, and a 10% chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill 10% of the global population. (World War II killed under 4%.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.

Many climate experts say the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”

Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” Cyclones might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.

A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a 6% probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.

The U.S. and other nations — but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example — should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:

In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

As we have seen previously when a Republican has won a presidential election, the progressive individual income tax — in which the more you earn, the higher of a percentage of your earnings are subject to taxation — has once again become a target for dilution or elimination. We have long heard about schemes like the “flat tax,” where tax brackets are abolished in favor of a universal percentage rate. During the closing days of his second presidential campaign, Donald Trump went further, calling for eliminating the income tax entirely.

“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s … this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” Trump said. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”

We should probably start by noting that Trump’s proposal is based on historical fiction. The individual income tax brings in half of federal tax revenues, which is a lot of money. “It’s an absurd idea for many reasons, the biggest being that it is mathematically impossible to replace the income tax with tariffs,” Erica York, senior economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, told CNN. “Imports are a much smaller tax base than taxable income, and there’s no way to squeeze enough revenue from taxing imports to fully replace taxing income.” Tariffs currently bring in about 2% of federal income.

The 1890s weren’t too bad … for a few years. They called it the Gilded Age — until the Panic of 1893, which triggered a severe depression, staggeringly high unemployment and massive social unrest. The resulting decline in tax collections forced the imposition of — wait for it — an income tax that was overturned about a year later by the Supreme Court. In fact, income taxes came and went throughout the 19th century. As for the U.S. being “relatively the richest it ever was,” that’s debatable but also a ridiculously low bar. The miserable economy of the first century and a half of American history was punctuated by bank failures, stock market crashes, widespread unemployment and depressions so severe that money stopped circulating at times and people had to make do with barter. Between the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1873 (which led to the Long Depression) and the Depression of 1882-85, Americans were either losing everything or accumulating wealth that was about to be lost. We were a sh—hole country.

The modern income tax as we know it came to be with the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which clarified Congressional fiscal prerogatives. It is hard to imagine, without this massive new source of income into the federal treasury, that the United States would have successfully fought in World War I, much less developed into the global superpower that it is today. While the boom-and-bust cycle of American capitalism has devastated countless lives and businesses, in the 20th century the federal government collected sufficient funds to create a rudimentary social safety net, something people of the 19th century could only have dreamed of. That was almost entirely due to the income tax.

Progressive income taxes have the dual advantage of being fair and practical; the richer you are, the higher percentage of your income you can afford to pay. A person who earns $200,000 a year and pays 50% of that in taxes still keeps more money in the end than someone who earns $100,000 a year and pays 40% in taxes. The government taxes rich people because, as the bank robber Willie Sutton was falsely said to have said, that’s where the money is.

If we want to draw lessons from history about the relationship between taxation and economic prosperity, perhaps it would be more relevant to consider the point at which the U.S. tax code achieved peak progressiveness.

In theory, this would be the early 1960s, with a top marginal rate of 91% charged to the highest income individual taxpayers in the top hundredth of 1%. There has been a general downward trend against progressivism since then; currently taxpayers who earn more than $609,000 a year have a 37% marginal rate. But taxes are complicated. As the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez wrote in 2007, “the numerous deductions and exemptions mean that the tax rates listed in the tax tables might be a poor measure of the actual tax burden faced by each income group. In addition, some forms of income, such as capital gains, have traditionally faced lower tax rates; this benefits disproportionately high-income taxpayers.”

The effective tax rate — the actual percentage of your income that you actually end up paying — is what we need to look at when considering whether the current tax system is sufficiently progressive. That data is clear: While the effective tax rate for the average earner has remained at about 14% since World War II, it has fallen from about 50% to about 25% today. Rich people are, more than ever before, where the money is — income disparity is at a record high — but the federal government is taxing them half as much as they used to.

A word about the flat tax, which will likely come up for discussion as even right-wing Republicans in Congress quickly come to realize that Trump’s idea is a nonstarter: The only thing to recommend is its simplicity. No more complicated deductions, no more saving your receipts. It’s simple. It’s also insane: Someone who earns $20,000 a year can’t afford to pay taxes at all.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to simplify a tax code so complicated that Americans pay billions of dollars a year to experts to calculate, prepare and file their taxes. But there’s nothing complicated about slapping the biggest burden on the wealthiest Americans who, after all, enjoy the best of everything that America has to offer. If you get to sit in the box seats in the arena and eat the best food and hobnob with the top players, you should pay the highest price.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.