That’s a crude interpretation of his well-thought out article in the Wall Street Journal, but Martin Feldstein (Harvard economist; president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research; chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan) basically says just that.

Basically, the future is bleak at this point. We’re looking at soaring unemployment, loss of America’s competitiveness, and a slower recovery than we dare imagine. Obama, Feldstein says, has learned all of the wrong lessons from economic recessions and tax schemes of the past.

Mr. Obama’s biggest proposed tax increase is the cap-and-trade system of requiring businesses to buy carbon dioxide emission permits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the proposed permit auctions would raise about $80 billion a year and that these extra taxes would be passed along in higher prices to consumers. Anyone who drives a car, uses public transportation, consumes electricity or buys any product that involves creating CO2 in its production would face higher prices.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf testified before the Senate Finance Committee on May 7 that the cap-and-trade price increases resulting from a 15% cut in CO2 emissions would cost the average household roughly $1,600 a year, ranging from $700 in the lowest-income quintile to $2,200 in the highest-income quintile. Since the amount of cap-and-trade tax rises with income, the cap-and-trade tax has the same kind of adverse work incentives as the income tax. And since the purpose of the cap-and-trade plan is to discourage the consumption of CO2-intensive products, energy or means of transportation by raising their cost to consumers, the consumer-price increases would be the same for a 15% reduction in C02 even if the government decides to give away some of the CO2 emissions permits.

Of course, it doesn’t take a Harvard economist or the Congressional Budget Office to tell us that. It’s common sense: Raise costs for businesses and they’ll pass the increase on to consumers. That means that average Americans, people already trying to meet their bills and mortgages, will end up having to fork out more money just to get the same services/products. The Obama Administration and other proponents of cap-and-trade understand that well, they just don’t care.

The next-largest tax increase — with a projected rise in revenue of more than $300 billion between 2011 and 2019 — comes from increasing the tax rates on the very small number of taxpayers with incomes over $250,000. Because this revenue estimate doesn’t take into account the extent to which the higher marginal tax rates would cause those taxpayers to reduce their taxable incomes — by changing the way they are compensated, increasing deductible expenditures, or simply earning less — it overstates the resulting increase in revenue.

And Ed Morrissey points out the fallacy in the Obama Administration’s consistent logic:

This is a recurring theme with Obama and tax policy.  He and his advisors use static analysis to predict results from tax increase, ignoring the effect that tax changes have on revenue.  He assumes that a 7% increase in the capital-gains tax, to use one example, will result in a 7% increase in revenue from the previous year, but that’s simply not the case.  The tax hike will cause people to change behaviors to avoid paying higher taxes, either by cashing out this year (resulting in a loss of capital to the marketplace) or not selling off stakes in companies and investing the profit elsewhere.  The effect of the change will itself limit revenues, probably more than the increased percentage will capture, making the policy a net loss to the government.

You see, President John F. Kennedy — a legend among liberals and Americans in general — understood a very basic concept. In order to increase tax revenue for the federal government, he…lowered taxes. He explained how the two are related:

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

Yes, that’s Democratic President John F. Kennedy. The result of his cutting the top tax rate from 90% to 70%? A 62% increase in tax revenue. President Ronald Reagan would cut taxes again in January 1983, leading to a 54% increase in tax revenue. All the way back to the 1920s, cutting taxes significantly increased tax revenue by 61%. You’d think a pattern might be emerging there.

Anyway, back to Feldstein:

The third major tax increase is the plan to raise $220 billion over the next nine years by changing the taxation of foreign-source income. While some extra revenue could no doubt come from ending the tax avoidance gimmicks that use dummy corporations in the Caribbean, most of the projected revenue comes from disallowing corporations to pay lower tax rates on their earnings in countries like Germany, Britain and Ireland. The purpose of the tax change is not just to raise revenue but also to shift overseas production by American firms back to the U.S. by reducing the tax advantage of earning profits abroad.

The administration is likely to be disappointed about its ability to achieve both goals. Bringing production back to be taxed at the higher U.S. tax rate would raise the cost of capital and make the products less competitive in global markets. American corporations would therefore have an incentive to sell their overseas subsidiaries to foreign firms. That would leave future profits overseas, denying the Treasury Department any claim on the resulting tax revenue. And new foreign owners would be more likely to use overseas suppliers than to rely on inputs from the U.S. The net result would be less revenue to the Treasury and fewer jobs in America.

Translation: Welcome back to the era of Jimmy Carter. Maybe they’ll even have an anniversary premiere of Saturday Night Fever.