Raising taxes on rich unlikely to cut deficit

Taxing wealthier people is back in style with Democrats in the White House and running Congress, but the government's fiscal house is in such disarray that even that well-trodden path will prove to be no cure-all for the nation's soaring $1 trillion budget deficits.

Estimates by nonpartisan groups such as the Urban Institute and Tax Policy Center show that without any serious efforts to cut spending, tax rates on the wealthiest people earning $200,000 or more — the group targeted by President Obama — would have to rise to prohibitive levels of between 77 percent and 91 percent just to bring the yearly budget deficit down to manageable levels of around 2 percent to 3 percent of economic output.

Despite those estimates, the trend toward raising taxes on higher-income earners is well under way. Mr. Obama's health care reform program nearly doubled the Medicare tax on people earning more than $200,000 and subjected their investment income to the health care tax for the first time...