Look out, America: President Obama is coming for your money. And this time, almost no one is safe.
The budget he proposed Monday sucks a mind-blowing $2 trillion in new taxes from hard-working Americans — of practically all stripes — over the next decade.
You’d think that the president might have taken pause after Bay State voters last month handed Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to an avowed tax-cutter, Scott Brown.
Wrong.
Clearly, Obama isn’t letting a little thing like that stop him.
Under his plan, Uncle Sam’s cut of US output would rise by nearly half a trillion dollars in the next two years alone. That’s a 13.5 percent jump (from 14.8 percent to 16.8 percent).
Who gets socked?
Almost everyone, one way or another.
And many folks won’t even know what hit them, because Obama & Co. pretend that eliminating “tax cuts for the wealthy” isn’t really a backdoor tax hike.
Start with upper-income taxpayers, who bear the brunt: Over the decade, they’ll cough up an extra $1 trillion, as the top two income-tax rates jump to 39.6 percent and 36 percent.
That’s particularly bad news for New York, which is home to a bigger share of such taxpayers than other states.
Nor is the middle class spared; it’s likely to see a range of deductions curbed or cut.
There’s more, much more — like a 33 percent jump in the capital-gains tax (from 15 percent to 20 percent) and new levies on banks and oil companies that all consumers will ultimately pay (even if they don’t know it).
Now, certainly all these new taxes will wipe out the federal deficit, right?
Dream on.
Actually, that’s the real scary part: While Americans fork over more and more of their cash, the extra money won’t remotely keep up with new spending.
Under the president’s budget, outlays grow to $3.8 trillion in 2011, a 29 percent spike since just 2008.
That’s right: Next year’s deficit would soar to $1.6 trillion — the highest in US history, and the largest share of GDP (25.4 percent) since World War II.
And those trillion-dollar shortfalls (or close to it) continue through 2020, totaling $8.5 trillion for the decade — financed, presumably, through borrowing.
Might that spell the beginning of the end of US global dominance? As Obama’s own chief economic adviser asked: “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”
Yet, rhetoric aside, the president seems to care no more about that than he does about Massachusetts.
Washington mustn’t treat the public’s “hard-earned tax dollars . . . like Monopoly money,” he warns.
Yikes!
Imagine if it did that.