We’ve heard the Class Warfare message from Democrats going back generations… the rich need to pay more taxes.  It was a Democrat – Kennedy – who urged taxes to be slashed (they were after his death) and ushered in strong economic growth.

But Barack Obama is campaigning against the “wealthy” even though his wife spent over $440,000.00 of taxpayer money to send herself and their two children on vacation.

Be that as it may, Illinois’ experience of making the rich pay their “fair share” should be a warning to all as to what you get:

After trying to tax Illinois to governmental solvency and economic dynamism, Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has been governor since 2009, now says “our rendezvous with reality has arrived.”

Quinn raised personal income taxes 67 percent (from 3 percent to 5 percent), adding about $1,040 to the tax burden of a family of four earning $60,000.Illinois’ unemployment rate increased faster than any other state’s in 2011.

Quinn got a lame duck Legislature (its successor has fewer Democrats) to raise corporate taxes 30 percent (from 7.3 percent to 9.5 percent), giving Illinois one of the highest state corporate taxes, and the fourth highest combination of national and local corporate taxation in the industrialized world.

The tax increases were the result of fiscal mismanagement and instead of righting the ship, sent it to the bottom of the ocean.

Meanwhile, back in D.C. Barack Obama’s first Chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, wrote in a report she wrote in 2010 while working for Obama:

In short, tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output.

 The paper she published with her husband concludes that:

The Romers’ baseline estimate suggests that a tax increase of 1% of GDP (about $160 billion in today’s economy) reduces real GDP by 3% over the next 10 quarters.

In all cases, the effect of tax changes on output remains large and highly statistically significant. Thus the finding that tax changes have substantial impacts on output appears to be very durable. That including controls for known output shocks has little effect on the estimated impact of tax changes is important indirect evidence that our new measure of fiscal shocks is not correlated with other factors affecting output.

In other words, you raise taxes, you kill economic growth.

Exactly what Illinois found.

It should be noted that Romer, who is a Democrat, left her position with the Obama administration.  Obviously publishing a major paper on the negative effects of tax increases while your boss is pushing for them wouldn’t have been a good career move.

So why does Obama want tax increases?

It’s not to help the economy so why?

To build the welfare state is the only logical answer which remains.

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