COLUMN RIGHT/ HALEY BARBOUR : Like Taxes? Want More? Vote Clinton : The so-called top 2% tax bracket would stretch down to incomes of $36,600.

Bill Clinton and his minions have worked themselves into a lather over Bush-Quayle ads that show how Clinton’s economic plan will raise taxes on working Americans. True to form, Clinton has dodged the arguments and accused Republicans of dirty tricks. But as the governor loves to say, that dog won’t hunt. The truth is, he will raise your taxes.

Check the fine print of his economic plan. Clinton proposes to raise taxes by $150 billion. He says he can raise $82.9 billion by increasing to 36% the income tax rate on the wealthiest taxpayers, hiking the Alternative Minimum Tax and imposing a surtax on millionaires. He claims he can get the money by taxing only those who make more than $200,000 a year, “the top 2%,” in his words.

That’s not true, and he knows it. According to figures from the departments of Treasury and commerce, the top 2% includes any individual who earns more than $64,800. And Clinton knows that he can grab up only about $59 billion of the $83 billion he needs out of that top 2%, according to Treasury Department figures.

So Clinton must dig deeper into middle-class pockets, and raise the top rate on every individual who earns more than $53,400.

But there’s more. Clinton pretends he can collect $45 billion in revenue by taxing the earnings of foreign corporations. That’s a joke. In the last year for which we have figures, foreign corporations in America produced a total of only $2 billion in taxable income. Congress’ Joint Tax Committee charitably assumes that Clinton may be able to raise $1 billion over four years--leaving Clinton a mere $44 billion short.

As Clinton well knows, he can cover this shortfall only by raiding even more middle-class pocketbooks. Treasury statistics show that Clinton can get his money only by throwing individuals with taxable incomes of $36,600 and up into his roster of the rich-and-taxable.

The deeper you look into Clinton’s plan, the more appalling the deception becomes. He does not fund his health-care plan, for instance. The Congressional Budget Office and the Urban Institute estimate that the governor’s health-care proposals would cost about $200 billion a year. Even if he slaps on a 7% payroll tax, he still would run a deficit of $120 billion a year.

Clinton also has advocated imposing a 1.5% tax hike on businesses for worker retraining. That would cost billions more.

Looking at this, you can only conclude that Bill Clinton thinks of the economy as a kind of board game, where you can always get money from the taxpayer. But while Clinton has made no bones about his intention to raise taxes, he has not been forthright about who would pay.

As Sam Nunn said recently: “Anybody who thinks you can raise taxes only on the rich and get the budget under control is wrong. They haven’t looked at the arithmetic . . . Anybody who says they can do that is misleading you.” Look into the details of Bill Clinton’s plan, and you’ll find that he plans to slam virtually every American who does not qualify for welfare. To make things worse, he would weigh down our economy at a time when we need all the steam we can get to beat our industrial competitors.

Yet that’s just part of the Clinton charade. Bill Clinton also wants to raise federal spending by $220 billion. I have no doubt that the Democrat-controlled Congress will rush to spend that money and more. The real problem arises when Clinton says he’ll offset the spending by cutting $145 billion in other spending.

While his spending hikes are real, his cuts are not. He provides specific cuts totaling only $4.4 billion--or only 3% of the total he needs. The other “cuts” come from faint wishes--$10 billion from the nonexistent line-item veto, $16 billion in “administrative reforms” and so on.

Finally comes the crucial matter of his “middle-class tax cut.” Once upon a time, Clinton promised a middle-class tax cut, but it has disappeared from his plan. Look at the tables at the back of his plan. The middle-class tax cut just isn’t there.

When you get down to the basics, Clintonomics amounts to higher taxes, more federal spending and increased government regulation of the economy.

I can’t imagine an approach more at odds with the times or the needs and mood of the American people. I haven’t had anybody ever tell me, “What’s wrong with America is that the federal government is not spending enough money and my taxes are too low.” But Clinton seems to believe that people think that way.

So if you believe we need more spending and taxes, vote for Bill Clinton. He won’t disappoint you.