Details here; an excerpt:

Consider the following little noticed facts:

Last November California voters approved tax increases for people making more than $1 million–and earmarked the proceeds for mental health programs. New Jersey has enacted legislation taxing those making more than $500,000–and uses the money to offset regressive property taxes.

In Connecticut–which is currently considering a new tax on incomes over a million–a recent poll found 77% of voters in favor of the tax (including 63% of Republican voters!)

The conservative Virginia State Senate has also approved legislation to raise income taxes on those making more than $150,000. And in Indiana, Mitch Daniels, once President Bush’s extremely conservative White House Budget director (“the blade”) and now governor of the state, proposed a special tax increase on residents making more than $100,000 a year

Even as Washington has been cutting taxes for the rich, these initiatives aim to raise them at the state level….

[T]argeting the very top elite groups can put 95-98% of the electorate on one side of the line of political demarcation–and only a tiny 2-5% on the other side. As the Republican poll data in Connecticut suggest, the extremely unequal economic gains of the last decades have made targeting the highly favored few politically and ethically compelling. The top 1% of income recipients currently garner for themselves more money each year than the bottom 100 million Americans taken together….

America’s top 1% of wealth owners currently have title to just under 50% of all stocks, bonds and business assets. Government statistics show that an even tinier group–a mere 2/10th of 1%–made more money from the sale of stocks and bonds than all other taxpayers taken together in the most recent year for which data is available (1999). This is the reality behind the rhetoric of the Bush “ownership society.”