A simple question: "What is income?"

Did Barack Obama take Tax 1 in law school? I did, and I remember the first day of classes, when mild mannered Professor Boris Bittker asked a simple question: "What is income?"

I was pretty confident I could come up with a quick answer, and so were a lot of other students. By the end of the hour, after Professor Bittker had politely punched huge holes in every student's definition, it was pretty clear that none of us could. Income is a slippery concept -- especially slippery when you're trying to tax it.

Which leads me to think that Obama may have avoided Tax 1. Or perhaps he dozed off in class. For in his speech last Wednesday, the speech to which Standard & Poor's responded by reducing the government's credit rating to "negative," he seemed to think he could get all the money we need to balance the budget from higher taxes on the rich......