Much has been said about what the fiscal cliff bill – passed among much congressional huffing and puffing and emo legislative drama – will do for the middle class. We all know by now that it will wipe out dreaded tax hikes that would have descended like locusts after the Bush-era tax cuts were supposed to end.

But as you go through each of the 157 pages of the American Taxpayer Relief Act, the idea of the middle class as a special interest seems a little, well, provincial for the world's putatively greatest legislative body. How about Puerto Rican rum distributors? Rescuers of trapped miners? Nascar owners? People who own plug-in electric vehicles? Are they not people too, with an equal right to special tax breaks to protect them from the vagaries of the Internal Revenue Service? Congress, apparently, answers with a resounding yes: damn the austerity, and full speed ahead with a tax break in every pot.