TOO LOW TO NOTICE:

On January 1, a new set of allegedly confidence-killing, consumption-destroying, investment-unfriendly taxes hit the economy. The payroll tax rose from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent on the first $113,700 of income. The top marginal rate rose from 36 percent to 39.6 percent for families with adjusted gross income above $450,000. Taxes on capital gains and dividends for those same top earners rose from 15 percent to 20 percent. Meanwhile, the Affordable Care Act levied an additional 3.8 percent tax on investments, and an additional .9 percent Medicare payroll tax on families with adjusted gross income of more than $250,000.

The notion was that putting these taxes on the rich and middle-class, taxing income and investments, at a time when the economy was going at a painfully slow rate, would cause people to stop spending and investing, go Galt, and send the economy into a recession. To read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you would have thought Hugo Chávez had been named to succeed Barack Obama.

But three months into this new experiment in extremely mild socialism, it seems like Americans are generally shrugging off the tax increases.

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