Multiple choice: The Obama administration’s plan to reduce the never-ending deficit, released Monday, is:

1. Obama’s latest attempt to appeal to his base.
2. Obama’s latest attempt to stick it to Congressional Republicans.
3. Dead on arrival at the House of Representatives.
4. A serious effort to deal with the budget deficit and the debt and improve the economy.

Of those four choices, the wrong answer is option 4. Obama admitted himself Sept. 8 that raising taxes in the midst of a recession is crazy. So in a recession, Obama proposes to, yes, raise taxes and fees. There is no evidence — none, ever — that raising taxes will improve the economy.

Option 1, appealing to his base, and its corollary, option 2, are the  result of his own increasingly bad poll numbers. Obama’s poll numbers are much more meaningful than Congress’ poll numbers because voters can vote for only one member of Congress, not all of them, so voters’ opinion of Congress is approximately 0.2299 percent meaningful. Control of the House has not switched parties in consecutive elections since 1954, so Democrats’ dreams of taking back the House one term after losing the House are not supported by history. Moreover, the demographics of the 2012 Senate elections (that is, the six Democrats elected to the Senate in 2006, and the five Democrats retiring, including Wisconsin’s Herb Kohl),  mean that Republican capture of the Senate has a better than even chance.

Vodkapundit has some math questions for the administration:

The promise is to generate $3 trillion in savings. One third of that, $1T, comes from defense spending in Iraq and Afghanistan that isn’t going to happen anyway. The drawdowns are already in place. You can’t “save” money you were never going to spend. So already we’re down to $2T in deficit reduction.

Next, the President wants to wring $580 billion out of entitlements, by finding that many dollars worth of “waste and inefficiency.” Of course, we were already granted a boon of $500 billion in cost-free savings in Medicare when ObamaCare passed. If we pretend, like the President does, that those $500 billions were really saved, it’s hard to see where we’ll find another imaginary $580 billion. So now we’re down to a mere $1.42 trillion in deficit reduction — over the next ten years.

But don’t worry because Obama says we’re going to get $1.5T in deficit reduction from tax hikes on “the rich.” What’s the real number? Let’s use a little something I call the “Clinton Rule of Thumb.” When President Clinton and the Democratic Congress jacked up taxes in 1993, revenues only increased by about two-thirds of the expected amount — and that was in a booming economy. So using the CROT, we can expect Obama’s tax hikes to generate $1T in new revenues.

However, this economy is, shall we say, not booming. So let’s cut the number in half again: $500 billion dollars in new revenues. And unlike the rest of the malarky in the President’s plan, I expect the tax hikes to be as real (and as serious) as a hemorrhagic fever. Which leaves us with a deficit plan that “saves” half a trillion dollars over the next ten years — or by a little more than one-third of our deficit spending from just last year.

This isn’t a credible plan. This is yet another soak-the-rich/class-warfare scheme aimed solely at securing Obama’s reelection.

Obama’s reelection strategy, such as it is, increasingly appears to emulate the 1948 Harry Truman reelection campaign. Independent of the dubious wisdom of emulating a campaign strategy that is more than 60 years old when, to put it mildly, this country is different from 1948,

Forbes.com’s Janet Novack shows that the Obama administration’s definition of “millionaire” is someone with more than $250,000:

Indeed, most of Obama’s tax proposals will apparently repeat those he has made before. For example, $800 billion would come from letting the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 expire at the end of 2012, meaning the top rate on ordinary income such as salary would rise from 35% to 39.6%. Last month, in a New York Times op-ed, [Warren] Buffett called for two higher tax rates—one on income over $1 million and the other on income over $10 million. Published reports over the weekend variously suggested Obama would endorse a new millionaire’s rate or release some sort of proposal for a minimum tax on millionaires—say to replace the current convoluted alternative minimum tax.  But Sunday night, the Administration official said the Buffett rule was simply a principle for tax reform.

Most people earning more than $1 million are already taxed at a higher effective rate than their secretaries. In 2008, for example, taxpayers with adjusted gross income between $1 million and $10 million paid an average of 24.5% of their adjusted gross in federal income tax, compared with an average of 12.6% for those earning $100,000 to $200,000, and 8.4%  for those earning $50,000 to $100,000. But the 400 highest income taxpayers do pay a lower effective rate  than mere millionaires—an average of just 18.1% in 2008. That’s because the top 400 get the bulk of their income from capital gains, which are taxed at a top rate of 15%, scheduled to rise to 20% when the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. If tax reform is to insure that billionaires pay a higher effective rate than the upper middle and middle class it would have to reduce or eliminate the break for capital gains—something that was done in Reagan’s 1986 tax reform but that doesn’t sit well with most Republicans today.

National Review’s Kevin Williamson back in March identified the biggest problem with a soak-the-“rich” tax plan:

There are lots of liberal definitions of “rich.” When Pres. Barack Obama talks about the rich, he’s talking about people living in households with income of more than $250,000 or more, the rarefied caviar-shoveling stratum occupied by the likes of second-tier public-broadcasting executives,Boston cops, nurses, and the city manager of Lubbock, Texas (assuming somebody in her household earns the last $25,000 to carry her over the line). Club 250K isn’t all that exclusive, and most of its members aren’t the yachts-and-expensive-mistresses types.

Nonetheless, there aren’t that many of them. In fact, in 2006, the Census Bureau found only 2.2 million households earning more than $250,000. And most of those are closer to the Lubbock city manager than to Carlos Slim, income-wise. To jump from the 50th to the 51st percentile isn’t that tough; jumping from the 96th to the 97th takes a lot of schmundo. It’s lonely at the top.

But say we wanted to balance the budget by jacking up taxes on Club 250K. That’s a problem: The 2012 deficit is forecast to hit $1.1 trillion under Obama’s budget. (Thanks, Mr. President!) Spread that deficit over all the households in Club 250K and you have to jack up their taxes by an average of $500,000. Which you simply can’t do, since a lot of them don’t have $500,000 in income to seize: Most of them are making $250,000 to $450,000 and paying about half in taxes already. You can squeeze that goose all day, but that’s not going to make it push out a golden egg.

But like certain other exclusive clubs, Club 250K has an inner sanctum, a special club within the club, the champagne room of socioeconomic status. And that is Club 1: the million-dollar-a-year club. Not the millionaires’ club — lots of the people earning $1 million in any given year do not have $1 million in assets — but, still, a million a year, even in rapidly depreciating U.S. dollars, is not too shabby. But the trouble for liberals is, Club 1 is really, really exclusive: Only 0.2 percent of U.S. households have incomesthat high, meaning that there’s only about 200,000 of them. And like Club 250K, Club 1 is bottom-heavy: There are a lot more $1 million men than there are $6 million men. And there are a whole heck of a lot more $6 million men than there are $60 million men.

You want to tax Club 1 to get rid of the deficit, you have to hit each of those 200,000 households with an average tax hike — not an average tax bill, but tax increase — of $6 million. And a lot of those Club 1 households don’t have $6 million in income to start with, much less $6 million left after the taxes they’re already paying. …

Capital is sensitive — it just wants to be loved! — and it will go where the love is, where it can be fruitful and multiply. Setting trillions of dollars’ worth of it ablaze on the altar of Washington’s self-importance every year is not going to get it done, and there simply aren’t enough rich people for us to pillage or enough loot to make it all work. We have finally, as the lady predicted, run out of other people’s money.

If Obama was really interested in a centrist deficit and debt plan, it might look something like what David Frum posits: