President Barack Obama's budget plan taxes wealthy to aid middle and lower classes

This story says:

WASHINGTON — From front to back and on nearly every page, President Barack Obama's new budget plan delivers a message that's seldom been heard in American politics for more than three decades: It's time for the rich to pay their fair share and lighten the load on the middle class. [Emphasis added]

Wait, a progressive income tax, which requires those in upper income brackets pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, isn't a fair share? If not, then what is a fair share?

Barney, is there an answer in there?

MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews asked the right question of Rep. Barney Frank:

MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you about the numbers. Do you think there‘s enough money in the added income—the re-added income taxes of those above $250,000 a year—is there enough income up there to tax, enough taxable income to bring into the federal Treasury over time to pay for the cost of a real national health care system?

Here is Frank's non-answer, which you can see in context here:

FRANK: Well, thanks to the incompetence of the—where the financial system has worked the deregulation, there aren‘t as many rich people as there used to be and they‘re not as rich as they used to be. But over time, it will be there. But you do have to do more.

And one of the things that I most liked about the president‘s state of the nation speech—which I thought was a very good speech, very well delivered, even better than very good—he talked about ending the spending on cold war weapons. One of the great things of inconsistency that I think, Chris, of people who worry about spending—they brought us the Iraq war, the single biggest addition to the deficit, and unlike some other things, it‘s all money that we lose. We don‘t get any of it money back.

They have projected—you know, we are now—according to the Bush budget, we‘re going to spend billions of dollars to protect the Czech Republic from being attacked by Iran. Now, I‘m not a regular reader of the fatwas...

(LAUGHTER)

FRANK: Well, that‘s true. I don‘t regularly read all the fatwas that come out of Teheran, but I am not aware that they are about to declare war on the Czech Republic, and I don‘t see why I should spend billions of dollars to stop it.

Somehow, we got from asking a real question about how to finance TARP, stimulus, the 2009 and 2010 budgets and whatever comes next into fatwas. Too bad that Matthews inexcusably let Frank get away with it.

Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party

Once more it's not what is being said that's important for so many of my simpleminded colleagues, but who is saying it and how it is being said. What not engage in a debate over ideas rather than focusing, like this sorry article, on putting down the speaker and his adherents?