"It’s easy enough to dismiss Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endless lament that the rich don’t “pay their fair share of taxes,” but he should still be held to account when he flat-out lies about how much the rich do pay.
"In an op-ed published by the Guardian, Sanders repeats a number of leftist tropes: income inequality has never been greater, the Trump tax cuts benefited the rich and big corporations, the middle class is getting screwed. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
"But then he starts making some remarkable claims.
"He says that Warren Buffett’s tax rate is 0.1%, “while the average schoolteacher paid 9.8%.”
"Elon Musk, he says, faced a tax rate of 3.3%. Jeff Bezos’ is less than 1%. Michael Bloomberg’s is 1.3%, while “the average registered nurse paid 13.3%.”
"If that seems too outrageous to be true, that’s because it is.
"Those numbers are based on an analysis by the leftist ProPublica, which compared the taxes paid by these billionaires with their wealth, not their income.
"But as anyone who pays taxes knows, the government taxes income, not some fanciful measure of wealth.
"That same ProPublica report shows that from 2014 to 2018, Buffett paid $23.7 million in taxes, against an income of $125 million. That’s a tax rate of 19%.
Jeff Bezos paid $973 million in taxes on income of $4.22 billion. That’s a 23% tax rate.
"Musk’s tax rate was even higher – 30% – since he paid $455 million on income of $1.52 billion.
"So how did ProPublica manage to force their “true tax rates” down to near zero? Simple, they estimated how much their wealth had increased over those same years using estimates compiled by Forbes of the value of their stock, property, and other holdings, then said that, because those “gains” weren’t taxed, their “true” rates are super low." . . . More...
