from John Hawkins

Our country could fix its problems if the rich paid "their fair share!" Many people incorrectly believe that the rich are getting by without paying taxes and if we somehow forced them to pay their "fair share," all of our problems would be solved.
That's simply not true.

We already have the most progressive tax code of any western nation, which isn't exactly a shocker when you consider the fact that 47% of Americans pay no income tax at all while we have the 2nd highest corporate income tax in the world and "taxpayers with at least $100,000 in adjusted gross income each year account for 12% of the tax returns, 49% of the income and 75% of the taxes."

In other words, the "rich" are paying through the nose already and setting all notions of fairness aside, it’s impossible to loot enough from them to pay off our deficit and debt, much less finance any new spending.

"In fact, in 2006, the Census Bureau found only 2.2 million households earning more than $250,000. And most of those are closer to the Lubbock city manager than to Carlos Slim, income-wise. To jump from the 50th to the 51st percentile isn’t that tough; jumping from the 96th to the 97th takes a lot of schmundo. It’s lonely at the top.
But say we wanted to balance the budget by jacking up taxes on Club 250K. That’s a problem: The 2012 deficit is forecast to hit $1.1 trillion under Obama’s budget. (Thanks, Mr. President!) Spread that deficit over all the households in Club 250K and you have to jack up their taxes by an average of $500,000 — which you simply can’t do, since a lot of them don’t have $500,000 in income to seize. Most of them are making $250,000 to $450,000 and paying about half in taxes already. You can squeeze that goose all day, but that’s not going to make it push out a golden egg.

….Every time you raise the threshold for eating the rich, you get a much, much smaller serving of meat on the plate — but the deficit stays the same. The long division gets pretty ugly. You end up chasing a revenue will-o’-the-wisp." — Kevin Williamson

Even if Obama were to get his way and Republicans agreed to pass all the new taxes that Obama wants, it wouldn't make a significant dent in our deficit THIS YEAR -- much less get the deficit under control long term, pay off the debt, or fix our long-term problems with Social Security and Medicare that are dragging our nation towards insolvency.