Class warfare need not be taxing Class warfare is an enmity that dare not speak its name. When the deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, called for higher taxes on the rich during a speech at the Institute for Government on Thursday, he seemed to regret that tax cuts for "hard-pressed and hard-working families" could be effected no other way. President Barack Obama struck a similar note in his State of the Union speech two days before, as he defended the principle that no one earning $1m a year should pay less than 30 per cent of their income in taxes. "Now you can call this class warfare all you want," Mr Obama said, "but asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense. He is right, but when George W. Bush argued 12 years ago that "no one in America should have to pay more than a third of their income to the federal government," most Americans thought that was common sense, too. Common sense this volatile is not common sense at all. It is class warfare. There are two basic rationales for socking it to the rich: a pragmatic one and a vindictive one. In an age of very mobile capital, the pragmatic arguments for expropriating the plutocracy's assets are weak. Mr Clegg and Vince Cable, UK business secretary, support the "emergency" 50p top rate of tax on incomes above £150,000. And yet HM Revenue & Customs has reportedly calculated that the measure raises only a few billion pounds a year - next to nothing when measured against a net debt that recently reached one thousand billion pounds. Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate for US president, released his tax returns this week. They showed that he had paid just $3m on his 2010 income of $21.6m, which is just the tip of his quarter-billion-dollar iceberg of wealth. Mr Romney, in other words, is paying taxes at a lower rate than most of the middle-class Americans he seeks to rule. And this inequity is made possible in part by a special rule on "carried interest" that taxes the earnings of managers of private equity, such as Mr Romney, at the super-low capital gains rate of 15 per cent. And yet, if this rule on carried interest were discarded tomorrow, it would win the US Treasury only an additional $2bn a year. If Mr Obama were to raise taxes on those earning $1m per year, it would cover only the tiniest fraction of a deficit that last year reached $1.3tn. If Mr Clegg were to succeed in passing a new wealth tax, it would probably raise no more revenue than such laws have in France, and might actually chase wealth out of Britain. It is not only in the Anglosphere that one finds second thoughts about money made hand over fist. This week in France, Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande proposed a tranche supplémentaire on incomes above €150,000. In Germany, the Free Democrats" obsession with lowering taxes for entrepreneurs has led voters to reject the party. If measures to curb inequality have such a weak pragmatic rationale, they must have a vindictive rationale. This is payback, not a commonsense solution that requires - alas! - that someone's ox be gored. That is why arguments about settling scores with the rich take the form of stunts, rather than programmes or legislation. This week David Cameron, the UK prime minister, sent the knighthood of Sir Fred Goodwin to a "forfeiture committee" in the hope of degrading the former Royal Bank of Scotland boss. Mr Cameron also weighed in against paying a big bonus to Stephen Hester, the CEO brought in after the financial collapse to rescue the bank (of which UK taxpayers now own five-sixths). As the public rallies behind these actos de repudio, to use the Cuban term, legislators may come to support the class war, and new laws may follow. It is easy to suspect, however, that stunts are all the politicians wish for and all the public will ever get. The US Congress was angry enough to vote once against the $700bn troubled asset relief programme in 2008 - but not angry enough to demand a seat on the executive compensation committees of those banks that they committed the US taxpayer to bail out. When Mr Obama and his fellow Democrats held the presidency, the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they could have eliminated the carried interest accounting rule in a single afternoon. It remains in the tax code because Mr Obama's party - which, let us not forget, holds the allegiance of 19 of the richest 20 postcodes in the US - wanted it there. To describe politicians as engaged in class war is not to condemn them. There are just and unjust class wars, in the same way that there are just and unjust wars on the battlefield. In one of the weirder passages in his State of the Union speech, Mr Obama suggested the US "take the money we're no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home." Of course, as Mr Obama used to know, the money spent for US wars can't pay down the debt - it is the debt. Mr Clegg has a more realistic appraisal of the situation. In his slashing attack on crony capitalism on Thursday, he called for the personal tax allowance to be raised to £10,000, saying taxpayers were at boiling point. Here he may be speaking not so much ideologically or psychologically as pragmatically. Working-class taxpayers are maxed out to the point at which a tax rise or a pay cut of just a percentage point or two could mean missed meals, even lost homes. There ought to be enough combustible material here to maintain the ardour of Messrs Clegg and Cable for a while.