Are you tired of hearing the rich bitch about how much they pay in taxes and how the Obama administration is going to ruin them financially and take away all their incentives to make even more money?

Well, you should read a piece by David Sirota at Salon.com. As he points out, the wealthiest 5% of earners in the U.S. make 36.5% of the national income, and they actually pay 38.5% of the taxes, NOT the 60% they use as a figure to whine about. In fact, Sirota notes, this is actually LESS than they paid in taxes, proportion-wise, than they did in the go-go era of the Bush regime.

“I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Healthcare and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.

Finally.

Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.”

And that other conservative canard about how small businesses are the engine of economic growth? Another fiction. As Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post, and former senior editor for Inc. magazine, points out,

“Suffice it to say that, in terms of new job creation, the data show that most of it happens in a small number of very fast-growing companies that are no longer what most of us would consider small. There are lots of reasons for the success of these fast-growing firms, among them the ingenuity and hard work of their founders, the availability of capital and a culture that celebrates risk-taking.

But the dirty little secret is that a lot of small-business job growth has also been driven by the decision of big businesses to outsource many tasks that they used to do in-house. In an economic sense, jobs haven’t been so much “destroyed” and “created” as they have been shifted from one company to another. ”

Pearlstein goes on to argue that small businesses make no logical sense to argue that paying for their employee’s health insurance will cripple them.

Most likely, those small businesses today are no longer competing with big companies, but with other small firms with similar cost structures. Requiring all of them to offer health insurance wouldn’t put any firm at a competitive disadvantage — it would simply raise costs for all of them, forcing them to pass those costs on to someone else.

So the next time some well-off acquaintance starts bemoaning their plight while you are trying to survive on Ramen noodles, let them know what the facts are.