Raising taxes will do nothing to reduce the deficit. It will only drive the economy down.
Eliminate those U.S.Departments of the Federal Government not explicitly described as powers granted to the Feds in the U.S.Constitution, while at the same time reforming taxation so loopholes are eliminated and everyone pays a flat tax or Federal sales tax (either of which is collected by the States), and remove restrictions off of oil/gas drilling - this country will be out of a depression in short order.
The point of the political exercise is not fiscal but political.
Class warfare is seen as the only way to rouse the ire of the lazy detritus that is the Democrat party to get them out to vote.
BUMP!
History shows that when Congress gets more revenue, the pols spend it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575620502560925156.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h
In the late 1980s, one of us, Richard Vedder, and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University co-authored a often-cited research paper for the congressional Joint Economic Committee (known as the $1.58 study) that found that every new dollar of new taxes led to more than one dollar of new spending by Congress. Subsequent revisions of the study over the next decade found similar results.
But no matter how we configured the data and no matter what variables we examined, higher tax collections never resulted in less spending.
"Polls consistently find that a majority of Americans believe any new taxes will be spent by the politicians," pollster Scott Rasmussen told us recently in an interview. The grand bargain so many in Washington yearn for—tax increases coupled with spending cuts—is a fool's errand. Our research confirms what the late economist Milton Friedman said of Congress many years ago: "Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with."