Reuters:  Obama’s Self-Defeating War on the Wealthy, by James Pethokoukis:

The push by the Justice Department, along with the IRS, to compel UBS to fork over the names of some 52,000 American taxpayers with banking accounts in Switzerland may produce an important benefit for the Obama administration — or so it might think. How so? Those presumably wealthy 52,000 taxpayers, along with some two million other upper-income Americans, can be drafted to help pay for U.S. healthcare reform.

Under the $1.2 trillion plan passed by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, the wealthiest 1.2% of U.S. households would have to pay an additional $540 billion in taxes over the next 10 years via an income surtax of between 1 and 5.4%. For the super-elite, those in the top 10th of 1% (and presumably the type of taxpayers who have Swiss bank accounts), that works out to an additional $280,000 a year in taxes on an average annual income of $2.3 million a year, according to the Tax Policy Center. …

The wealthy have the means to manipulate tax laws to their advantage through various — sometimes outlandish — tax sheltering strategies. As Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center puts it, "The bad old days of bull semen partnerships may not return, but I suspect the financial Merlins are already cooking up new shelters for what promises to be a booming new market."