“The last thing you want to do is raise taxes during a recession.”

Those words were spoken in August 2009 when the United States was coming to grips with a financial calamity. Those words were spoken by President Barack Obama. Those words were fundamentally correct. Raising taxes on anyone — ever — is the wrong solution for a country’s economic growth, but raising them in a recession is even worse.

By his ideology and that of the party to which he belongs, one of the tenets of growing an economy is redistributive economics — taking from those with means and allocating them through social programs to those without means rings of a kind of “ism” that once ran rampant in the Soviet Union.

The fact, though, is that when Obama made those comments in an interview with NBC News, he was figuring that by September 2011 the country would have come out of the recession. The Democrats had control of the executive and legislative branches of government and had just passed nearly a trillion dollars in government “stimulus” to pull the country from disaster.

But fast forward to today. Unemployment is at a disastrous 9.3 percent nationally. The housing market growth is stagnant. One ratings agency downgraded the United States’ credit rating. The International Monetary Fund has pegged economic growth in the USA to move at a snail’s pace through 2012.

On Monday, Obama laid out his new plan to get America working, although it has not been presented to Congress on paper. The new plan — since the government spending binge hasn’t seemed to work — is to hike taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” to the tune of $1.5 trillion over 10 years. The country is still stuck in recession. So, following the president’s words in 2009, he is doing exactly what he said is bad for the economy.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. While not calling the president insane, such cannot be said about his economic policies. All that will be accomplished with this plan will be for Obama to shore up his “tax-and-spend” voting base.

Forgive those who question this strategy. If it is never a good time to raise taxes during a recession, why is he posing massive tax increases?

Simple: His ego and ideology will not allow for any other plan. He is the epitome of tax-and-spend. And he is wrong.