During his State of the Union address last week, President Barack Obama proposed, as a matter of fairness, taxing people with incomes of $1 million or more at least 30 percent.

Missing from the president's remarks were any indication as to what would be done with the money. Would it go to reduce the deficit, or towards some new program? That's a sucker's bet.

Also absent was any suggestion of how much such a tax would generate. Not as much as you might think, particularly relative to total tax receipts and the size of our ongoing budget deficits.

Fair or not, million-dollar income earners could pay more, but even all of their considerable combined income would not cover our current annual deficits, let alone fund additional outlays.

According to Internal Revenue Service statistics for 2009, the latest year for which figures are available, there were 236,883 individual tax returns listing gross adjusted incomes of $1 million or more. That's less than a quarter of a percent of the 101.4 million returns filed.

Those wealthy taxpayers had a combined taxable income of $646.5 billion, which produced a total tax of $167.5 billion. If the taxable income listed on those tax returns was taxed at 30 percent, that figure would have jumped to $194 billion -- an increase of $26 billion and change. The federal government blows through almost $9 billion a day, making the additional revenue from a millionaire's tax enough to fund the government for a long weekend. That's little more than a rounding error in $3.5 trillion of annual spending.

Of course, every additional dollar raised is a dollar that doesn't have to be borrowed. But the same can be said of every dollar not spent.

We admit that these are imperfect calculations. But even if the amount collected from those taxpayers were doubled it would barely nick a trillion-dollar deficit. As we said in August, if it wants to fund either significant new spending or deficit reduction through taxation alone, the administration will have to drill through the rich and deep into the middle class.

What is needed is a comprehensive overhaul of the tax code, coupled with real spending reforms that address Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs. In the end, that could mean all Americans ante up in some form or another.

The president's proposal has more to do with sound politics than sound fiscal policy. What politician would campaign for re-election by telling 300 million Americans to either pay more or sacrifice their government largesse when instead he can mislead them into believing a couple hundred thousand rich people can cover the whole load? An honest one.