By Gary Wickert

It sounds good, doesn't it? What better way to eliminate our deficit, pay down our debt, and send America back into the black again? The rap star with the 25,000 sq. ft. crib and seven Bentleys; the fat cat Wall Street executive; the tattooed NBA star who makes more in a playoff series than most do in a lifetime; the shoe store salesman who stumbles into a $400 million lottery ticket. Let's tax them more and ease the burden on the "working middle class." Everyone hates taxes. And everyone wants someone else to pay all the taxes. So let's soak the rich. The only problem is, it doesn't work.

Barack Obama won reelection on the back of envy and ignorance. Envy is the only of the seven deadly sins which is uniquely human. Analysts have calculated that a one-time 100% tax on millionaires' income would run the federal government for a mere two and a half months, after which there would be no more "rich" people to envy. But the actual tax-increase plans being proposed by Obama do not start with people who have an income of a million dollars a year. They start with people who have incomes of $250,000 and up. These are small businesses – the owner of the local pet shop, bakery, hair salon, art gallery, and hamburger joint.

$250,000 is more than most Obama voters make, but it is far short of a million dollars, and light years away from a billion dollars. According to the Internal Revenue Service, there are more than 2,700,000 people who earn $250,000 a year or more — and fewer than one-tenth of them earn a million dollars or more. More than 9/10ths of the people who targeted with the higher taxes supposedly aimed at “millionaires and billionaires” are neither.

Small businesses employ half of all private sector employees, pay nearly 50% percent of total U.S. private payroll, create more than half of the non-farm private GDP, and have generated 65% percent of all net new jobs in the past 15 years. It is no wonder that our president is no more qualified or capable to lead us into a more robust economy than he is to run a profitable hot dog stand. He has done everything in his power to destroy the very small businesses that employ and provide health care (at least for now) to the very under-informed who voted for him. Those who create, build and employ in this country are left wondering why our president dislikes small businesses so much.

According to a recent Ernst and Young report, a lapse of the Bush tax cuts in 2013 will mean an increase from 35% to 40.9% in the top tax rate, a meteoric rise from 15% to 44.7% on the top tax rate on dividends, and a rise in the top tax rate on capital gains from 15% to 24.7%. The report shows that these tax increases will discourage savings and reduce investment, sending 710,000 more people to the unemployment rolls. Undoubtedly, most of these 710,000 voted for our president. How do you help people who won't help themselves?

Obama's lack of understanding of how jobs are created and things are made will be the undoing of our country. The same presidential ignorance which thought giving a tax break for hiring new employees would lead to new hiring was evident with Obama's signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – a/k/a the first stimulus. It overwhelmingly benefitted big business and big unions. According to the liberal Huffington Post, less than 1% of stimulus funds targeted Main Street businesses.

President Woodrow Wilson himself once urged Congress to reconsider whether very high tax rates are in fact “productive of revenue” to the government. He said that, beyond some point, “high rates of income and profits taxes discourage energy, remove the incentive to new enterprise, encourage extravagant expenditures, and produce industrial stagnation with consequent unemployment and other attendant evils.” That sounds a lot like what is happening today. But socialism is a religion; one that feeds on populism and envy, fails every time it is tried, and practices human sacrifice on the altar of progressivism.

Those hardest hit by high tax rates that drive jobs overseas are likely to be those who are unemployed and need jobs here. Ironically, millionaires and billionaires may have the least to lose from higher tax rates on “the rich.” But Barack Obama has the most to gain from class-warfare rhetoric that wins votes from gullible voters.

In President Obama’s world view, those making over $250,000 Americans don’t work, do not constitute “working families,” and don’t own small businesses. It is politically specious to lump millionaires and billionaires lumped together anyway. I'm no math whiz, but one has to earn a million dollars a thousand times in order to have a billion dollars. Being a “millionaire” and a “billionaire” are hardly the same thing. But they rhyme, and they make for a catchy political slogan for the under-informed voter who, sadly, will never read a political article but outnumber those who will.

The gullible voter swallows whole without even chewing our president's class envy bill of fare as though it was an allyou- can-eat buffet. The thousands of times our president used the phrase "millionaires and billionaires" was outnumbered only by the times he referred to the rich not paying their "fair share" of taxes – perhaps the dumbest thing ever said in the history of mankind. The top 20% of income earners - those making as little as $74,000 – pay 70% of federal income taxes. If anything is unfair, it is the sad fact that half of America pays no personal income tax. They are the "working class families" who have no "skin in the game" yet swallow whole our president's class envy rhetoric and childish urge to punish success. When will the left understand they are chasing their tail? The intelligent, successful, driven risk-takers will always wind up on top no matter how closely our president follows Saul Alinsky's rules for tearing down America in order to rebuild it. They'll just do it some place else.

Obama's minions propagate his anti- American rhetoric in the scariest of venues. The California Federation of Teachers enlisted the help of selfproclaimed socialist and has-been actor Ed Asner to narrate a cartoon being shown to America's children that demonizes wealthy Americans for their success. “Over time, rich people decided they weren’t rich enough," the video goes. "So they came up with ways to get richer. The first way was through tax cuts. They didn’t mind that this meant fewer services for everyone. They said, ‘why should I care about other nonrich people?’"

Class warfare, as we have been told by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Alinsky, and Obama, is inherent in a capitalist society because of the conflict between management and labor, between the owners of corporations and their employees, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And the only solution to this conflict is the peaceful or violent transfer of corporate ownership from the stockholders to the employees. Can you say General Motors? We are witnessing that transfer - the pied piper reading from the teleprompter the class warfare rhetoric he learned from his mentor, Saul Alinsky, who once wrote in his book Rules for Radicals, the following:

"What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."

The only problem is, the millionaires simply go somewhere else, leaving behind the unemployed and under-informed to deal with a political ideology that hasn't worked anytime, anywhere in the history of mankind. Two-thirds of millionaires simply left Britain following Gordon Brown's introduction of the new 50p top rate of income tax shortly before the last general election. In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million to HM Revenue and Customs before the popular "tax the millionaires" measure. The number fell to just 6,000 after. France's socialist-controlled houses of parliament won office by promising to "tax the rich." Incomes above 1 million euros a year would be taxed at 75 percent instead of the current 41 percent. The measure was incredibly popular. Less than 3,000 such "rich" were affected, making the measure nothing more than symbolism with reallife implications - the rich are now leaving France in droves. The exodus from California has likewise turned into a stampede. Out of the 25,000 or so sevenfigure- income California families, more than 5,000 left in the early 2000s, and the loss of their tax payments accounted for about half that state's massive $14 budget hole.

Winston Churchill once said, "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. It's inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." These self-inflicted populist measures - driven by envy and fueled by rhetoric of politicians like our president who capitalize on political ignorance - ensure that those on the bottom of the food chain will never see the light of day and will forever be dependent on the good graces of government – an oxymoron if there ever was one. Our president's policies of envy are not killing the rich; they are killing the American economy and the American dream. America has a significant lesson to learn from the election of last November. An American president who seeks to patronize one segment of society by demonizing another deserves the support of neither.

Gary Wickert is an author, trial lawyer and town of Cedarburg Supervisor, who lives in Cedarburg with his wife, Lisa and two sons. He can be reached at garywickert@ameritech.net.