President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on March 1. Among the laundry list of new and ongoing spending programs that he touted, the president renewed his call for higher taxes on the rich:
I’m not looking to punish anybody, but let’s make corporations and wealthy Americans start paying their fair share. . . . And that’s why I’ve proposed closing loopholes for the very wealthy who don’t pay — who pay a lower tax rate than a teacher and a firefighter.
That’s just about exactly what President Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address, when he argued:
Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
These claims are made in so many different fora by so many leftist politicians that people no longer even challenge the merits of the statements. The media in general and the public at large merely accept the idea that our tax code is unfairly weighted in favor of high-income people to the point where the rich don’t pay while the load is carried by middle- and low-income citizens.
But that’s just not true. And the fact that it is not is so easily shown that it’s astonishing to me that so few in the legacy media even challenge the claim.
To fact-check the president on this, one need only consult Treasury data, which are readily available on the IRS’s website, without even the inconvenience of having to submit a FOIA request. The Tax Foundation did an analysis of the latest data. The reality is far from what the president and those in his camp would have you believe.
Story continues at: Presidential TAX lies
