A BASIC RULE OF POLITICS has always been that you tax other people’s constituents to provide goodies for your people. So Barack Obama deserves credit for breaking from this with a tax plan that will hit well-off blue-staters — his core constituency — the hardest:

New York tax filers reporting more than $375,000 a year in earned income may end up paying nearly 60% of their wages in taxes to the government under a Barack Obama presidency, economists who have analyzed his plan said. The Democratic presidential candidate is proposing not only raising the federal income tax, but also adding a Social Security tax for those Americans earning more than $250,000 a year. For New Yorkers, that could mean that if the current Social Security rate is applied, the marginal tax rate, or rate on every extra dollar earned, could rise to 58%.

Well, good for him. More on Obama’s tax plans and blue-staters at TaxProf.