David Leonhardt of the NYT just noticed that tax rates are going up and wealth is being redistributed. This makes him happy. But right now American faces a wealth creation problem. And if that isn’t working, every other problem facing America looks a lot worse. He also assumes that wealthier Americans won’t change their behavior, reducing the government’s take. Again, here is WH CEA Chair Christina Romer’s take on higher taxes when she was a econ prof at Berkeley: “Tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output … [and] that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.”