Congressman Paul Ryan has rightfully identified President Barack Obama’s deficit plan as the lead-up to class warfare.

While Obama has suggested his plan isn’t class warfare, but rather “simple math,” you may recall that Wisconsin Democrats actually tried to incite class warfare when they attempted to recall three Republican representatives for voting for necessary budget cuts.

Unions rallied around the state capitol for weeks accusing Governor Scott Walker of subverting the economic security of working people in favor of the wealthy — in other words, condoning class warfare. Their seditious rhetoric didn’t work and Wisconsin’s economy is now heading in the right direction while unionism has never been more irrelevant.

Inciting class warfare won’t work on the national level either.

I spent a lot of time in Indonesia during the waning days of the Suharto dictatorship. According to Transparency International, the Suharto family was the most corrupt crooks in the history of the world making off with more than $100 billion.

Whenever things got tough on the Suharto’s and their inner core of cronies, Suharto would deflect raging national anger at his failed economic policies onto the ethnic Chinese minority, blaming the economically successful Chinese minority for the countries chronic poverty and hardship.

This resentment would boil over causing deadly riots lasting for weeks, where ethnic Chinese communities would be torched. It created the conditions where the wealthy in Indonesia moved their assets to the nearby safety of Singapore. Indonesia sank deeper and deeper into despair while Suharto clung to power.

Ultimately Suharto’s class warfare policy failed. History is littered with despots that have scrambled to find scapegoats for their failed economic policies. Most recently this has occurred in Russia with the Jews.

Could this now be happening in America?

Believing that a “millionaire’s tax” will raise the money needed to pare down the deficit in a meaningful way is ludicrous. Obama’s plan to target the rich for $1.5 trillion in tax increases over the next decade is ill-conceived.

What’s more, it will raise havoc with the tax code, adding another layer of stress to business owners who are already stressed about a floundering economy and no sense of direction from the White House to fix it.

Obama’s refrain has changed from “Yes we can” to “The rich must pay their fair share.”

We have gone from soaring heights to trading in hate, fear and anxiety.

Already the top 2 percent of wage earners in America pay 30 percent of the tax burden while the top 10 percent pay 70 percent of all income taxes.

Can someone tell me what their fair share is?

An interesting sidebar to all of this, according to a recent Gallup Poll, a majority of American’s believe that 51 percent of all federal expenditures are wasteful.

In other words, over half the dollars we pay in taxes are flushed down the Potomac. Pretty sobering stuff however the President would have us believe the American people would trade job creation for “taxing the rich.”

We have seen this before. Obama looks at successful business owners and sees dollar signs. When did making money become a crime? When was the last time you got a job from a poor person?

The world envies America’s capitalism structure that rewards people for being risk takers. Now we’re punishing those very people with onerous tax increases. For the millionth time, business owners don’t stuff dollars into their pockets; they reinvest them in their business. It’s called capitalism, and it is the foundation of America’s free enterprise system.

Does Obama think our job creators will change their minds and jump back into the game if he keeps proposing the same doomed-to-fail deficit spending and tax proposals? Why does he bother to propose a deficit reduction plan that punishes our job creators with new taxes while saying he will veto any cut to benefits under Medicare and remains silent on Social Security?

Further taxing the rich won’t create a single new job; instead many jobs will disappear. The American people are screaming “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Obama is answering with “tax the rich.”

It looks to me like we are heading for a showdown and based on history, class warfare always loses.