Imagine you’re a Hollywood big-wig with money to burn. Buying into hope and change, you drop a hefty $31,050 to get Barack Obama elected president. The result? He changes the tax structure on one of your favorite industries, threatening its very existance.

That’s an expensive comeuppance. But hey, you get what you pay for.

Harrison Ford is appearing in a $1.5 million ad blitz by the general aviation industry aimed at convincing Congress to drop Obama’s plan to replace fuel excise taxes with user fees for smaller aircraft.

The ads, paid for by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, are pretty tepid — they don’t directly call out Obama, even though it’s his budget proposal that includes the changes. Here’s one, in which Ford says:

General aviation is facing the most serious challenge in its 100-year history.

New costly fees, if passed by Congress, could jeopardize at least 1.2 million jobs and depress the $150 billion that general aviation pumps into our economy.

And from a shorter, 30-second version:

A Washington, D.C., plan for costly new fees could shut down community airports and impact over 1 million jobs.

The proposed fee structure would impose some $7 billion in user fees on everything from charter aircraft to hot air balloons. The pilots association, while buying time on cable TV networks, appears trepidant to put the blame on the president (in fact, the campaign’s ads, literature and Web site doesn’t really explain how switching from a fuel excise tax to a user fee — or tax — will hurt the industry).

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ford gets more direct in a print version of the ad, calling the plan a “misguided budget scheme that would impose crippling new fees on general aviation that could devastate small communities in every state.”

Still, it’s all pretty innocuous. If the new fee structure is a “misguided budget scheme” that “could jeopardize 1.2 million jobs” in our country, shouldn’t Ford and the pilots association place blame where it belongs instead of making what looks like a deliberate effort to keep the president out of it?

The dirty little secret is that Ford helped bring this on. In the fall of 2008 he gave $30,800 to the Obama Victory Fund and $250 directly to the Obama campaign.

What did he think was going to happen? That the president’s promise to “spread the wealth around” wouldn’t affect him?

Maybe next time Ford will think about the consequences before dropping cash into the coffers of Hollywood’s candidate.