Pro-growth, market-oriented policies launched by Ronald Reagan 25 years ago unleashed record wealth creation and economic growth that continues to this very day. In fact, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth has shown that total compensation and consumer spending for all five income quintiles have steadily increased over the past three decades.

Furthermore, Alan Reynolds has shown that the percentage of households with income (adjusted for inflation) lower than $35,000 has actually fallen from 52.8 percent to 40.9 percent since 1967. (Wait -- it gets even better.) Households with a real income higher than $50,000 rose from 24.9 percent to a remarkable 44.1 percent.

In other words, the middle class is shrinking because America's families are getting wealthier. And the reason lower-class jobs are vanishing is not due to some Lou Dobbs protectionist conspiracy theory, but because our technologically driven, knowledge-based economic pie keeps expanding.

Edwards doesn't understand that without incentives to reward successful investing, entrepreneurship and risk-taking, everyone gets poorer -- right on down the line. Additional investment taxing is precisely the wrong policy to improve wealth or poverty.

Class warriors on the left are loathe to admit it, but America's poor are also a whole lot less poor when public assistance programs like Social Security, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit and other social benefit plans are included in the poverty data. But Edwards, and others of his misguided ilk, have a nostalgic yearning for the Great Society plans of the mid-1960s. You'll recall that these policies dramatically succeeded by raising poverty and reducing wealth. What a neat idea.

Edwards just launched his campaign in New Orleans with a plea to spend even more taxpayer dollars for that beleaguered city. Well, why not -- we've already thrown $120 billion bucks at it!

Instead of Edwards' hackneyed, 1960s Great Society, anti-poverty approach to New Orleans, the United States and New Orleans would have been much better off had we made the entire city a tax-free zone -- with the tax burden limited only to what people spent or consumed, not what they invested or earned. This supply-side approach would have delivered swift currents of investment. It would have all but guaranteed a swift recovery.

But Edwards appears unable to grasp this. This class warrior fails to recognize that when you slam wealth, you raise poverty. Is that what we really want?