July 2, 2008
Investor's Business Daily on Obama?s Proposed Redistribution
"A Few To Support The Many" (editorial)
Economist Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, has looked at the Obama plan and found that it "would redistribute more than $131 billion per year from the top 1% of taxpayers to all other taxpayers."
$131 billion. In one year. That's the value of Intel, bigger than Coca-Cola and just below the market caps of Cisco and ConocoPhillips.
It's enough cash to fund the Education Department for almost two years or the entire Defense Department for nearly three months. And remember, this isn't the overall tax bill for the top 1% of taxpayers—it's just the amount beyond their current taxes that they would have to pay under the Obama plan.
If all that's not alarming enough, then how about this:
"In 2009," Hodge writes, "after the income-shifting in the Obama plan, the top 1% of taxpayers would pay a greater share of the total federal tax burden than the bottom 80% of Americans combined."
Apparently Obama believes it's fair for 1.13 million Americans to pay more to the federal government than, as Hodge notes, "128 million of their fellow citizens combined."
These numbers don't even include Obama's plan for hiking the Social Security tax, which he would apply to income above $250,000 a year, leaving a poorly thought-out, tax-free doughnut on income between $102,000, where the tax currently stops, and $250,000.
