The WSJ explained that even taxing the rich at 100% won’t foot the bill for the gargantuan Obama budget, let alone keep his $10 trillion in new deficits under control:

he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won’t see their taxes increased by “one single dime.” This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama’s new spending ambitions…

Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That’s about 7% of all returns; the data aren’t broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% — about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 — paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income…

as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

It is blindingly obvious that President Obama is selling snake oil. There is absolutely no way you can spend almost $4 trillion a year and add almost $10 trillion to the deficit and not increase taxes on the middle class. The rich simply don’t make enough money to pay for it all — even if you took it all away from them.

The sad reality is that the Obama administration is robbing the future to pay for the present. Who is this guy Obama that people are willing to put up with such obvious nonsense: is the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or merely PT Barnum?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 2:27 am and is filed under business, Democrats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.