The “wealthy”, also known as investors, business owners, and job-creators. All to fund the socialization and subsequent destruction of our nation’s health-care system. What a trade-off!

The House will propose raising taxes on people earning more than $350,000 a year to pay $540 billion for healthcare reform, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said Friday.

House Democrats had been weighing a plethora of other tax increases, such as levies on sugary soft drinks and alcohol, that raised hackles within their caucus…

Instead, Rangel said Democrats will seek to enact one large tax increase targeting wealthier workers to generate the revenue they need to finance their $1 trillion-plus healthcare reform bill.

“We have decided that instead of putting pieces of different revenue raisers together, that the best that we can do [is] we would have graduated surtaxes starting at [$]350],000],” Rangel said. The tax hikes would begin in 2011 and raise $540 billion over 10 years, he said after a meeting with Democratic committee members.

Democrats seem to think that the “wealthy” would only spend that money on vacations, expensive vehicles, and fancy dinners if they didn’t take it to fund the health legislation. They don’t connect the dots between the individuals — often business owners and investors — keeping their money and the economy being stimulated. Even spending money on dinners and cars would stimulate the nation’s economy and even help create or save jobs.

The good news is that the future of the legislation is more in doubt now than it has been since last November. Centrist Democrats have informed Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer that they oppose many crucial aspects of the socialization bill, including the creation of a public plan and the mere cost of the entire project. House Democrats have now decided to put off releasing the entire bill and examining it to an unspecified date in the future.

Please keep calling your representatives and expressing opposition to this bill. We need to halt this monstrosity in its tracks before we wake up one morning and find a health-care system more similar to that of France than the world-renowned system we have today. Don’t buy into the far-left propaganda; there’s a reason people from across the globe — including Europe and Canada — find their way to this country when they need advanced care.