Obama wants to save America from the scourge of capitalism. Ruinous taxation is the most efficient way of destroying businesses short of frankly outlawing them.

Do you own a business? You are a bourgeois exploiter of the working class, sucking the blood of those who toil. You will be punished. Obama doesn’t use language like that but that’s what he means no matter how he sweetens it. He has said he wants to spread the wealth around.

A typical socialist, he believes wealth is just out there waiting to be equitably distributed. He doesn’t understand wealth is the result of hard work, capital investment, prudent risk taking, and good management.

Raising taxes reduces the reasons to work, invest, or take risks. Higher taxes make it more difficult to earn more money.

That translates into less profits, fewer jobs, less equipment purchased, and a general reduction of standard of living. It’s bad enough to raise taxes in a booming economy. Raising taxes in a recession is a certain guarantee of a depression.

Here are some of the highlights of the different tax plans of the two candidates as they particularly affect business:

• The top personal rate under John McCain’s plan would stay at 35 percent. Obama’s plan would raise it to 39.6 percent. I believe he would raise it higher later in his term.

• McCain would leave the critical capital gains tax at 15 percent. Obama would raise it to 20 percent or 28 percent, depending on when you ask him. He has said both.

• The tax on dividends would follow the pattern of the capital gains tax except Obama wants to take as much as 39.6 percent.

• Dying can cost you plenty. Obama wants to take 55 percent of the assets you leave (and have already paid income tax and sales tax on) with a $1 million exemption. McCain would set the rate at 15 percent with a $10 million exemption.

• The self-employed and small businesses pay 37.9 percent in income taxes adding in Social Security and Medicare taxes. This would rise under Obama to 54.9 percent.

• McCain would abolish the hated Alternative Minimum Tax which essentially adds back into your taxable income all the income and deductions that are subject to exemption otherwise. Obama would leave it at 28 percent.

• Marriage penalty, a new tax, not exactly determined.

• McCain would reduce the corporate income tax to 25 percent, from 35 percent. He would also end complex, long-term write-offs for purchases of business equipment and infrastructure, allowing full deductions in the year of purchase. This would drive sales of such equipment strongly, creating new jobs and providing new profits yielding new tax revenue. And Obama would institute a windfall profits surtax of an unspecified amount. This would apply to the largest companies and incent them to move out of the country.

• One tax Obama has not mentioned — and may not — is the birth tax. Each person who is born a citizen of the United States is born owing his or her portion of the national debt. In essence, they are born into debt. The funded national debt is $10,310,660,083,540.45 as I write this. The per capita debt is about $33,815. That is the amount each newborn owes.

For now, we’ll set aside the unfunded debt, which increases it to $59.1 trillion or $516,348 per capita. We can cross that bridge when we come to it. The little tyke would have a lien recorded against him or her but the tax would not bear interest and would be payable over 10 years starting at age 20.

The government could book the liens as a current asset, allowing more debt to be incurred.

Obama hasn’t proposed a birth tax yet. But he might after he reads this. It’s not as far-fetched as you might think.

However, the situation under Obama would not be hopeless. Whenever liberals increase taxes, they create many loopholes so they don’t have to pay them.

Recall the days before the Reagan tax cuts when all sorts of tax shelters protected the wealthy from paying the nominally confiscatory taxes. The actual taxes paid by the rich approached zero. Tax lawyers and accountants would prosper. Expect that to happen again.

Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.waxmanmedia.com. Lionel Waxman’s Flashpoint commentaries are published in The Daily Territorial.