I know I promised an entry about taxation without representation—and I promise I’m getting to it—but this made my blood boil and I had to write about it.

This paragraph in particular enraged me:

John Paulson, the most successful hedge-fund manager of all, bet against the mortgage market one year and then bet with Glenn Beck in the gold market the next. Paulson made himself $9 billion in fees in just two years. His current tax bill on that $9 billion? Zero.

Congress lets hedge-fund managers earn all they can now and pay their taxes years from now.

This guy gets his day-to-day money by borrowing against his assets at a ridiculously low rate. Which means that according to the IRS, he made no money last year… despite being $9 billion richer now than he was in 2008.

And the worse part for those of us who pay our fair share is that even if he was paying taxes on all $9 billion of his income, it would have been at a rate of 15%, because people like him make their money through “capital gains” rather than through wages like the rest of us peons.

Think about that for a second. Think about the fact that the government almost shut down over what ended up being about $11 billion in actual cuts. If John Paulson had paid the capital gains rate, he alone would have put $1.35 billion in the treasury—a good 10% of that, by himself. If he were paying the actual marginal tax rate that wage-earners over $373,000 pay—that’s 35%—that would have been $3.15 billion more in tax revenues from him alone.

Now how many John Paulsons do you think there are in this country? How many more hedge fund managers who are paying the 15% rate—which is well lower than the average person pays, particularly when you take the 12% payroll tax into account—do you think there are in this country?

And how the hell can Republicans grouse about how the rich are overtaxed when a guy who made $9 billion over the last two years hasn’t paid one penny of tax? How hollow, how empty, how laughable does this make the Republicans’ fear-mongering about the deficit?

Now, I don’t entirely blame John Paulson for paying $0 in taxes. I won’t deny that I take advantage of every possible legal opportunity to lower my tax burden too. If I can legally deduct it, I deduct it. That’s how the game works. He’s doing what the law allows him to do.

But I do blame him, and his fellow wealthy-class ilk, for creating a system whereby they get to weasel out of paying their fair share by buying members of Congress to do their bidding.

Remember, your and my tax cuts were held hostage so that people like John Paulson—who weren’t going to pay their damn taxes anyway—would be able to keep their theoretical tax cuts. We real Americans have been told throughout this recession that we’d have to “tighten our belts” and “make do with less” in jobs, in benefits, in federal programs to help the poor and elderly, in states being able to pay teachers and fund schools… and by God we can’t raise taxes in a recession!

So instead of letting taxes on the wealthy go back to where they were under Bill Clinton—and the ’90s certainly weren’t a bad time to be wealthy, as anyone who was wealthy then will undoubtedly tell you—the cost of the tax cuts that helped cash-strapped working parents buy school supplies for their kids or that helped a few more working families go on a little vacation this year and stand on the left side of the DC Metro escalators was that rich people like John Paulson would get their tax break too.

They’re job creators! They shouldn’t have to share in the sacrifice! So here we’re left like saps holding the bag on the snipe hunt while the “job creators” hoard our nation’s wealth and find more excuses to lay off working Americans.

And why did this work? Because each and every member of one party, and far too large a proportion of the other, was put in office by the wealthy and powerful like John Paulson to do the bidding of the wealthy and powerful like John Paulson. “Of the people, for the people, by the people” my ass… when someone like John Paulson can buy a Congressional race using the change he digs out from between his couch cushions, the voice of “the people” is never heard in the halls of Congress.

Is there any better exemplar of the moral bankruptcy of our nation than John Paulson? A hedge-fund manager who has produced nothing, who has created nothing of value. He’s moved some people’s money around and made $9 billion for his effort. How has he made the country a better place? How has he improved our nation’s institutions, its industry, its culture, its people? The answer is that he hasn’t… and he hasn’t even contributed to our national treasury with his taxes!

And yet here we are cutting education funding, laying off teachers and firefighters, telling the poor that they can go elsewhere for heating assistance and telling the parents of hungry and sick children that funding for WIC and S-CHIP isn’t going to be there for them. Here we are eliminating collective bargaining rights for police officers and teachers, telling them that they’re going to be paid less and have less job security, because the state’s out of money. Here we are cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs from the government over the next couple of years because the federal government is supposedly broke.

And yet we have the gall to call ourselves a “Christian nation.” What’s Christian about this? What’s moral about this? What’s in any way acceptable about this? Nothing.

Working Americans are being screwed left and right, by their government and by their employers (if they’re lucky enough to have them), because “we don’t have the money.” We don’t have the money for schools or health care or benefits or a pension or to keep Medicare solvent.

Bullcrap. We do have the money. We have the money to give health care to every man, woman, and child in this country, to send every child in this country to a good public school with a teacher who’s paid enough not to have to work a second job just to make ends meet, to have a mass-transit system that’s the envy of the world, to go from a fossil-fuel based economy to a green economy.

We do have the money. It’s sitting in John Paulson’s brokerage account, and the brokerage accounts of a thousand other John Paulsons. When will we the people realize this, and demand that our leaders ask the John Paulsons in America to pay their fair share?