Mary Katherine Ham performs the math and demonstrates that total confiscation of all the assets of the rich would not, in fact, solve the federal entitlement spending problem.

This week, Michael Moore offered a simple and elegant solution to our debt problem.

Calling the assets of wealthy Americans a “national resource,” he suggested our problems would all be solved if we could just have access to all that money.

“What’s happened is that we’ve allowed the vast majority of that cash to be concentrated in the hands of just a few people, and they’re not circulating that cash. They’re sitting on the money,” Moore said. “That’s not theirs, that’s a national resource, that’s ours. We all have this… we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it.”

“America’s not broke,” he told a cheering crowd of pro-union protesters in Wisconsin. ...

The United States of America has about 400 billionaires. Moore calls them “400 little Mubaraks.” About half of those have less than $2 billion each, and those with a net worth in the double-digit billions is an exclusive club of about 30.

Still, as Moore says, “there’s a ton of cash out there.”

The grand total of the combined net worth of every single one of America’s billionaires is roughly $1.3 trillion. It does indeed sound like a “ton of cash” until one considers that the 2011 deficit alone is $1.6 trillion. So, if the government were to simply confiscate the entire net worth of all of America’s billionaires, we’d still be $300 billion short of making up this year’s deficit.

That’s before we even get to dealing with the long-term debt of $14 trillion, which if you’re keeping score at home, is between 10 to 14 times the entire net worth of all of the country’s billionaires, combined. That includes the all-powerful Koch brothers ($40 billion between them), the all-powerful George Soros ($14.5 billion), all the Walton family (of the Wal-Mart fortune), Steve Jobs, Oprah (at a paltry $2.7 billion), the Google Founders, Michael Bloomberg, and the Mars family (of the candy bar empire).

Contrary to the left’s favorite talking point, our economic problems do not have anything to do with inequality. The problem is actually the reverse: government is taking away from its rightful owners (and redistributing) so large a portion of this country’s economy that investment, enterprise, opportunity, and economic confidence have been depressed.

The real solution is for government to restrain its appetite and stand aside in order to allow the economy to function and to grow, increasing the general prosperity, lowering costs of goods and services, and making everybody better off.

2:05 video

Hat tip to Dirty Harry’s Place.

Campaign strategists of the democrat party are clearly the kind of people who see nothing wrong in using the image of a successful enemy attack on US forces for partisan political advantage.

It would never occur to these people that the image (taken from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which can be found around 1:35 into the trailer*) they are using is exploiting the pain and suffering (and possibly the deaths) of their fellow citizens incurred in the course of defending them.

• Hat tip to LGF Commenter MacGregor

This precise image could just as easily appear in an al Qaeda propaganda video accompanied by howls of Allahu Akbar!

0: 35 video

The cowards will certainly pull this one when the storm of outrage breaks over their heads, so here’s a link to a copy on YouTube.

Maybe it’s time to change the symbol of the democrat party from the jackass to something even more appropriate:

THE hunter has become the hunted. Michael Moore, the celebrated left-wing film-maker, has become the unwilling subject of a new documentary that raises damaging questions about the credibility of his work.

The director and star of successful documentaries such as Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has repeatedly been accused by his right-wing enemies of distorting or manipulating the material in his films. On his website he dismisses his critics as “wacko attackos”.

Yet the latest assault on Moore’s film-making techniques has come from an unexpected quarter. In Manufacturing Dissent, a documentary to be shown for the first time at a Texas film festival on Saturday, a pair of left-wing Canadian film-makers take Moore to task for what they describe as a disturbing pattern of fact-fudging and misrepresentation.

“When we started this project we hoped to have done a documentary that celebrated Michael Moore. We were admirers and fans,” said Debbie Melnyk, who made the film with her husband, Rick Caine. “Then we found out certain facts about his documentaries that we hadn’t known before. We ended up very disappointed and disillusioned.”

Melnyk and Caine are best known for their previous documentary Citizen Black, about Conrad Black, the Canadian-born former proprietor of The Daily Telegraph. Last week both of them acknowledged an important debt to Moore for popularising the documentary genre.

Yet when Caine and Melnyk began to follow him as part of their own documentary, their efforts to interview him met with the same kind of obstruction, denial and, ultimately, physical ejection that Moore had suffered when he tried to track down Roger Smith, the former chief executive of General Motors, for his first film, Roger & Me.

Read the whole thing.

Even leftists, if they look closely, can tell that Michael Moore is a liar and a fraud.