As I mentioned earlier, even a policy of taxing the wealthy is sub-optimal at this point compared to borrowing cheaply to create jobs by expanding fiscal policy. That’s not to say it’s always and forever sub-optimal. First, the rich park their money rather than spending it, so if you’re going to pay for job-creating measures, taxation on people who can afford it and who won’t scale back their own spending to the degree of others is the best way to do it. More important, the political economy has tilted massively in favor of the rich in this country. Tax policy that favors the rich, then, 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.

That’s why it’s so important for Warren Buffett to speak up today in the New York Times:

Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Buffett is not so naive to think that the super-rich have no say in the matter. Maybe he’s not out there demanding low tax rates, but I don’t think all of his class compatriots are that hands-off. Maybe there’s part of it where legislators bestow these gifts pre-emptively in the hopes of big campaign contributions, but I don’t think the rich are shy about advocating for themselves.

Buffett’s critique is familiar. America taxes work and not wealth, consumption and not production, the middle class and not the rich. He blows away the facile idea that the rich stop investing when their tax rates are high. He displays all the facts about inequality and the gradually cascading tax rate for the wealthy, facts that you don’t often see coming from a member of that American aristocracy. He closes by saying “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”

He’s right. And since the solutions of the Catfood Commission wouldn’t take effect until 2013, as would the expiration of the Bush tax cuts (which are massively tilted toward the rich), we have the opportunity to rework the tax code without harming the recovery in the next 17 months. It’s a path unlikely to be taken. But maybe someone will listen to Warren Buffett.