Barack Obama has spent the last several months insisting on a tax hike for higher income earners in the US, casting it as an issue of "fairness" and of deficit reduction. In his State of the Union speech, Obama used the word "fair" or a derivative nine different times, and calling for the wealthy to pay their "fair share" of taxes -- even though the wealthy account for a much higher percentage of income-tax revenues both as a share of the revenues and as a share of income than the rest of the population. Democrats have tried to push through a "surtax" on income over a million dollars in a year in order to put Obama's rhetoric into reality.
Speaking of reality, the UK did exactly what Obama and the Democrats propose to do here -- pass a surtax on high-income earners. The new tax rate of 50%, which took effect at the beginning of the year, was expected to raise a billion pounds in extra revenue each month. So how did that work out? Tax revenues dropped by more than £500 million:
