In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama ratcheted up his class warfare rhetoric, calling for an America "where everyone gets a fair shot" and "everyone does their fair share" – his latest attempt to blame upper-income Americans for our economic problems and hike their taxes.

In his State of the State address, Gov. Jerry Brown called for closing state budget deficits by increasing income taxes on the "wealthy" and hiking the sales tax. It's only "fair," he said.

"Fairness" – code for income redistribution – will be the theme of the 2012 elections. All year we will hear about "income inequality," "the gap between rich and poor" and that the only way we can solve our economic problems is to make the rich pay their "fair share" of taxes.

But the true inequality is that government spending is skyrocketing while middle-class income has shrunk. In the past four years, median household income fell nearly 10 percent, according to the Census Bureau, but the federal budget has ballooned 32 percent – from $2.7 trillion in 2007 to $3.6 trillion in 2011.

The true inequality is that the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 37 percent of all federal individual income taxes in 2009, with the top 10 percent paying 70 percent, according to the Tax Foundation, while nearly half of U.S. households pay no federal income tax at all, reports the Tax Policy Center.

The true inequality is that the top 1 percent of earners in California pays 40 percent of the state's income taxes while nearly half of California households pay no state income tax.

The fact is that if the federal government took the total household income of those earning $250,000 and above – or about $1.9 trillion – it would keep the federal government in business for about six months. Federal debt is growing so fast that within the next decade, it will consume 100 percent of the gross national product, according to the Congressional Budget Office. There is simply not enough revenue to match spending – no matter how much we tax the rich.

California's experience proves the fallacy of tax-the-rich schemes. California has among the steepest progressive income taxes in the nation, and we have raised taxes on upper-income residents many times. Yet we are running chronic budget deficits.

The fairness argument is, in fact, a fallacy to deflect attention from failed economic policies. Massive deficits, debt, stimulus, botched housing policies and mountains of regulations that have driven businesses overseas have shrunk middle-class income and diminished opportunities for people to advance.

Taxing the rich even more will not solve the spending crisis. It will kill jobs by penalizing small business and investment.

In fact, those who truly need a "fair shot" are the unemployed. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) stands at 5.6 million, or 42.5 percent of the jobless – the worst since the Great Depression. One in five Californians are without work, or are working part time but want full-time jobs. The answer to our woes is economic growth.

Instead we are told that we have two choices – the rich must pay more or everyone else must have less. This is like saying the only way everyone can have a slice of bread is to divide the loaf evenly – rather than baking another loaf so everyone can have a bigger piece.

The yeast needed for economic growth is not the spending plans of the masterminds in Washington or Sacramento. It is jobs – the energy of the people and entrepreneurs who create products and services to grow the economy.

We can learn a lesson from the Reagan recovery of the 1980s. After a severe economic downturn then, Reagan took the opposite approach of Obama and Brown. He passed across-the-board tax reductions for everyone, plus deregulation and other measures to take the shackles off the engine of economic growth. The result was millions of new jobs and an eventual doubling of revenues to the federal coffers.

"More people are drawing paychecks … than ever before," Reagan was able to report in his State of the Union address in 1984. GDP grew at an average annual rate of 4 percent during the Reagan recovery. Today it is limping at 1.8 percent.

But Reagan had a different definition of fairness.

"For a time, we forgot the American dream isn't one of making government bigger," he said. "It's keeping faith with the mighty spirit of free people under God."

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Margaret A. Bengs is a former political speechwriter who lives in Carmichael. Reach her at peggybengs@hotmail.com.

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