Dear David Brooks,

Generally I read your columns and respectfully disagree. Your new column is not up to your usual standards, in my opinion.

Perhaps the low point is:

Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling only meekly around the edges.

That's a pretty clever way to make $306,022,711,000 per year sound like not much money: first, split it into to separate pieces, then express it in the confounding "percent of debt paid per year." I guess, "Put together, that 3% dwarfs the principal reduction in the first year of a 30-year mortgage" wouldn't have made quite the point you wanted to...

This type of obfuscation is below you.