This spread is too thin to cover costs

Spread the wealth? Thanks, but for me and other ordinary Americans, spreading the wealth is an individual prerogative, not a pocketbook authority we’d willingly hand over to a spendthrift Congress led by a like-minded Barack Obama administration.

As late as Friday morning, in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, Obama reminded us yet again of what we can expect over the next four years if he is elected president. Such is his arrogance that careless rhetoric becomes policy. Asked by Roberts whether he regretted telling Joe the Plumber that his plan was to spread the wealth around, Obama replied, “Not at all.”

Reality is that this election is a tipping point, the point at which there are more people fully invested in government as its beneficiaries than those who count themselves as government’s burden-bearers. Economist Gary Shilling concluded last year that 52.6 percent of the nation now receives “significant income from government programs,” up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and 28.3 percent in 1950.

The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, meanwhile, found that in 2005, only 90.6 million of the 134.4 million Americans who filed income tax returns paid anything at all to support the burden of government. Some 44 million, therefore, either paid nothing or got a gift back. That’s 32.6 percent of those who filed. At the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term in 1988, that percentage was 20.6. The top 50 percent of taxpayers, who provide 97 percent of the revenue from individual income taxes, cover both the cost of government and the checks sent to those who get more back than they pay in.

What’s happening here is that the segment of the population that has a financial interest in containing the growth of government is dwindling, while the one that sees politicians as an income source grows. Under those circumstances, it’s virtually impossible to sell fiscal discipline as an agenda.

Adam Lerrick, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, spoke to the tipping point in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. He noted that in 2006, “220 million Americans were eligible to vote and 89 million —- 40 percent —-paid no income taxes.” Relying on conclusions from the Tax Policy Center in Washington, a joint venture of two liberal-leaning think tanks (Brookings and Urban Institute), Lerrick reported that tax credits proposed by Obama will remove 18 million more potential voters from the tax rolls, increasing the percentage of nonpayers to 49 percent. An additional 24 million, or 11 percent of potential voters, will pay less than $1,000 in taxes, Lerrick wrote. “The plunder that the Democrats plan to extract from the ‘very rich’ —- the 5 percent that earn more than $250,000 and who already pay 60 percent of the federal income tax bill —- will never stretch to cover to expansive programs Mr. Obama promises,” he finds.

Bob Irvin of Atlanta, a management consultant and former Republican minority leader of the Georgia House, observes that Obama “is trying to convince voters that his new taxes will only hit” those at the top.

“But do the rough math for yourself,” he continues. “Suppose he took a hundred million dollars a year from every Fortune 500 CEO. That’s $50 billion. If you add $100,000 from each of the top 1 percent, that’s 3 million people times $100,000 and that totals $300 billion.”

Continues Irvin: “You’re still less than halfway to the annual amount he proposes to increase spending, which is $800 billion a year. To get there, he’ll have to raise taxes on everybody else an average of $1,500 a year,” including illegal immigrants and those who pay no taxes now.

The promise of spending cuts is an illusion.

When a majority of voters become convinced that somebody else is paying for their happiness and any effort to cut taxes deprives them of pleasure, fiscal conservativism as public policy is dead. We are at that tipping point.

> Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor.

jwooten@ajc.com