Will the President’s deficit reduction plan work?

By Tom Quiner

The cornerstone of the President’s plan to reduce our deficit is to take away corporate tax breaks for corporate jets.

Charles Krauthammer did an analyses to calculate the net effect:

“I did the math. If you collect that tax for the next 5,000 years — that is not a typo — it would equal the new debt Obama racked up last year alone. To put it another way, if we had levied this tax at the time of John the Baptist and collected it every year since — first in shekels, then in dollars — we would have 500 years to go before we could offset half of the debt added by Obama last year alone.”

Okay, let’s cut the President a little slack, because he has another good idea, namely to take away an oil company tax break. Mr. Krauthammer made an extrapolation on how this would affect the deficit:

“Obama’s other favorite debt reduction refrain is canceling an oil company tax break. Well, if you collect that oil tax and the corporate jet tax for the next 50 years, you will not yet have offset Obama’s deficit spending for February 2011.”

The President’s premise is that we’ve got a tax problem. Charles Krauthmammer shows that tax increases just won’t cut it.

We need spending restraint.