Lil White Lies: Panic A Tax

Say we were three ambitious little kids who agree to contribute one third of our lemonade stand take to start the Big Lemonade Corporation. I had a really great traffic spot and made $900, but each of my buddies collected $300 each. So we had $500 total from the one third rate of contribution , $300 from me and $100 from each of my buddies. Of that $500, 60 percent was from me ($300) and theirs was 20 percent each ($100)…. In other words, I paid the same rate (one third) but it was a greater share (60%).

I don’t know how else to more simply explain this recent complaint at a cross-posted item at PolitiFact Bias and Sublime Bloviations, comparing a statement by Obama about tax rates with a statement last year by Michele Bachmann about tax share (as well as an insistence that PolitiFact is bound to use the "effective tax rate" he prefers).

Instead of reaching back to 2011 for apples to oranges, he needed only go to a recent PolitiFact Ohio ruling in March of Republican congressional candidate Jim Renacci, a ruling he may have dismissed since PolitiFact judged it to be True. Renacci said "The top 1 percent (of income earners) paid 36.7 percent (of the taxes). ... The top 50 percent pay 97.7 percent." We also need to put this in proper context, because he was talking about income taxes: as noted by the PolitiFact ruling “he was attempting to shoot down ‘a misconception on wage earners and income taxes paid,’ citing the percentage of the nation’s taxes paid in 2009 based on income levels.”

Previous to Renacci’s statement, PolitiFact had found four statements of the same order—income tax share—all True by Republicans Ron Cornilles, a congressional candidate, Texas Senator John Cornyn, Virginia congressman Eric Cantor and Georgia congressman Tom Graves.  Why didn't PolitFact Bias' Bryan White cite one of these (even though it was still apples to oranges)?  Perhaps because, Bachmann was found False, or as stated in the Cornyn ruling "...scoring points on tax policy depends on how you frame the issue."

And  Bachmann framed it incorrectly.  She was asked in an interview “shouldn’t the tax burden be equally shared.” To which she responded similarly to the others, only she (very clearly) said all taxes, not just income taxes, as was used in the rulings above.  Her ruling cross-referenced a claim made in 2009 by Nancy Pelosi—found False by PolitiFact-- that Bush's tax cuts for high earners "have been the biggest contributor to the budget deficit."

This seems to be the difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to debating our tax policy: Republicans stress share while Democrats stress rates. By the way, Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was called out False by PolitiFact for telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN that what he may have heard from one of these congressmen about the income tax share wasn’t true .

As far as White's complaint about "effective tax rates" ("that messy corporate and excise tax stuff") an extensive review of statements by Democrats on this topic as graded by PolitiFact did reveal some  incongruities and it's going to take another post all its own to reconcile them all, if that can be done. So while I'll say he may have a point, I won't be getting into it until later.

White needs to find a PolitiFact statement by a Republican on rate of taxation used in a similar context, particularly one rated “worse” for a Republican, where rates are compared between high and low income earners, or on an historical basis, not the share of taxes paid. The ruling evidence indicates that on income tax share, Republicans tend to emphasize that lower income earners don’t contribute a lot, which has been consistently rated True by PolitiFact.  Comparing the Obama ruling to  the one he chose of Bachmann didn't prove anything.

And don’t call PolitiFact overwhelmingly hypocritical when a decent apples-to-apples example of how PolitiFact rates Republicans differently than Democrats can’t be cited. Yes, PolitiFact is not perfectly consistent (and neither is White, obviously!), but it doesn’t prove any liberal bias.