Desperate Democratic Demagoguery

Harry Reid announced today that Senate Democrats are rewriting President Obama’s so-called jobs bill. They are replacing Obama’s revenue measures with a 5% surtax on taxable incomes exceeding $1 million. Hey, that’ll create a lot of jobs! Even the New York Times (!) can’t swallow it:

Indeed, the Democratic proposal seems much more about politics than policy.

Put aside for a moment that upper-income taxpayers are already paying far more than their fair share, a fact that has been documented too many times to count. How much money would the 5% surtax actually raise?

IRS data for 2009 indicate that taxpayers with taxable incomes of more than $1 million reported total adjusted gross incomes of a little over $726 billion. Five percent of that amount, if my arithmetic is correct, is $36,315,000,000. That would make up a whopping 0.028 of the FY 2011 federal deficit–a little under 3%.

One wonders why Reid stopped at 5%–if you confiscated 100% of all of these people’s incomes, you could cover 56% of the federal deficit, leaving Reid and his fellow thieves a mere $572 billion in the hole! Of course, this is a trick they could only play once, so they would be back where they started the following fiscal year.

It is hard to feel sorry for a demagogue, but the Democrats are rapidly becoming pathetic.

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