“All politicians lie!”
That’s just not true. However, the truth does get trampled often by political hacks. But if we look, we can find the truthful politician right after an election. He or she is the one who didn’t get elected.
Speaking truth to the public isn’t the easiest path to political success. Saying things that people want to hear will win elections.
The best example of this comes in our email boxes.
Yesterday, Ann Coulter sent me her latest column on John McCain. I wasn’t as interested in John as I was in the ads neatly tucked into her column and the margins of her email.
I really, really want to know more about how I can gain strength without exercise. I’ve always known that going to a gym was unhealthy. Now, I can be grateful to Ann Coulter for providing with this shocking research that “the fitness industry doesn’t want me to know.”
But before I could cancel that worthless gym membership, Ann had already confirmed that I was paying $50,000 too much in taxes!
“What would you do with an extra $50,000 dollars?” and “Keep your money in your pocket where it belongs!” Those two sentences dumped John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and George Washington into the garbage.
Not only has the ‘fitness industry’ been lying to me, the government has $10,000, $20,000, or even $50,000 dollars of my extra money!
I don’t know where Ann Coulter gets the extra time to talk about politics given the huge burden she must carry providing me with the truth about exercise and taxes!
Now that we know where to buy our snake oil, let’s get back to the truth by using that painful subject of taxes.
Jonathan Hoenig of Fox News sent me a video about the unfairness of the tax burden. According to Jonathan, the richest one percent of taxpayers pay 39 percent of income taxes!
How dare we treat our rich people like this! How dare we!
And, who is responsible for this abuse? According to dear Jonathan, it’s those Wal-Mart workers making ten bucks an hour!
I thought it was very clever for Jonathan and Fox News to blame Wal-Mart workers for the horrible burdens of being super-duper rich.
And since I just saved myself the annual cost of belonging to a gym, signed up with an online CPA service to get my extra $50,000 back from the government, I must be in that richest one percent group, right?
Wrong! And, Fox News is wrong about the unfair burdens of being in the richest one percent of Americans.
The most likely source of the Fox News report is the Tax Foundation. The Tax Foundation, a far right organization, should have gotten its raw data from the IRS.
Now the IRS puts out some really good statistics and publications, but I know the Tax Foundation and Fox News didn’t bother with a statistical analysis or even look at the existing online reports.
The top one percent of Americans with taxable returns had roughly 25 percent of all taxable income in 2005 and paid a tax rate of about 23 percent. If that doesn’t shock anyone, the top 400 taxpayers in 2000, earned an average income of over $170 million dollars each before taxes.
I’d like to be in that very exclusive group, wouldn’t you? What would you do with an income of $170 million before taxes?
Judging by Ann Coulter, Fox News, and their commercial sponsors, we’d cancel our gym memberships, hire an online accountant, and complain about $10 per hour Wal-Mart workers.
Ah, the Republican version of the American dream, to be lazy, ignorant, and rude to people who are doing nothing but working to make a living.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Ann Coulter thinks about dead people when she's making love.
While you're entitled to your views about whether high-income earners are too lightly taxed or not, you're not correct that the Tax Foundation's tables don't use official IRS data.
For example, here is their summary of federal tax return data, which is directly from the IRS. As you'll see in Table 1, it shows the top 1 percent do in fact pay roughly 39 percent of federal income taxes, for an average effective tax rate of 23 percent -- which is the highest of any income group listed by the IRS:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html
Whether that's a high enough rate or not is for you to decide. But it's not accurate to say the Tax Foundation is misrepresenting the plain facts about the highly progressive federal income tax.
Shimmy,
Ann Coulter has never 'made love' in her life.
At least not with a human.
Dear Andrew,
Ah, yes, the honorable Tax Foundation [TF] does 'use' IRS data just as a cat uses a litter box.
In this particular case, the TF plagiarizes an annual IRS bulletin. The bulletin is not a data release, a data summary, or a data analysis. Nor, is plagiarism a new crime.
Crime should always be rewarded and it usually is. Eventually.
In this case, what the honorable Tax Foundation has done in plagiarizing an annual bulletin is comparable to using a weather bulletin to report the weather.
To make the underlying fraud more clear, the TF is arguing from the smallest possible sample to make generalizations about the general population.
Since you seem intelligent but undereducated and under-informed, let me walk you through the weather bulletin analogy.
Someone, like you or the TF's author, is sitting in front of the television, watching some anonymous situation comedy.
The local TV station doesn't want to interrupt your viewing pleasure but needs to put out a severe weather bulletin.
So, some employee at the station creates a little banner to run across the bottom of the screen while you continue to listen to the canned laughter.
The little banner says something like, Severe Weather Warning is in effect for all of Georgia until 7 pm.
That doesn't mean the possibility of severe weather ends at 7 pm for all of Georgia.
It doesn't mean that all of Georgia is having severe weather until 7 pm.
The specific IRS bulletin plagiarized by the TF is at this link in pdf format.
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/05inrate.pdf
The TF has knowingly committed a fraud by using invalid logic to present an ideological point of view as being 'fact.'
As do you.
I hope when you are ill, you do not hire a physician who cures only 1 percent of all patients.
I hope when you have a toothache, you do not see a dentist who only uses Novocain 1 percent of the time.
But, if you truly want to use more than 1 percent of your brain to learn some facts about taxation and income in the United States, I'll be right here.
The Tax Foundation is in the gutter. Join them if you wish.
Andrew, if no one hasn't already guessed it, is a paid blogger.
Care to tell us who pays you, dear Amdrew?
Post a Comment