Liars, damn liars, and Biden

/

his Lips are moving

Biden's Discussion of Billionaire Tax Rates Is a Lie He's Been Telling for Years

John Sexton:

This is Bernie Sanders style demagoguery at its finest as even the NY Times pointed out.

Mr. Biden was referring to a White House study, released in 2021, that used a “more comprehensive measure of income” than is currently assessed. But it is not technically the tax rate paid under existing federal law.

The report in question included gains made in unsold stocks, which are not taxed until the asset is sold. It estimated the average federal income tax rate paid by the 400 wealthiest families in the United States to be 8.2 percent.

“So the gimmick here is that the White House has come up with its own estimate based on unrealized gains, i.e. if a billionaire like Elon Musk owns stock in a company and the value of the stock goes up, they count that as income even if Musk doesn't sell any stock. These are known as unrealized gains and no one is taxed on them.

In fact, the "study" released by the White House only looked at the unrealized gains of billionaires and ignored similar unrealized gains for anyone who owns a home over the last 20 years. If the value of that home has doubled, should you be forced to pay income taxes on the difference? The answer of course is no unless you sell the house and even then a certain amount of the gains are usually sheltered from taxes.

What the White House is doing here is imagining an alternate tax scheme in which the government taxes wealth instead of income. That's something that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would love to see but it's not how our system actually works. Biden has been making this bogus claim for a long time. He made it back in January and the Times fact checked it then. Here's the reality.

Under the law, the top 1 percent of earners in the United States are currently estimated to pay an average federal income tax rate of more than 20 percent, according to an analysis by the Treasury Department in November. An I.R.S. report that specifically looked at the top 400 individual income tax returns found that those taxpayers paid an average income tax rate of about 23 percent in 2014.

“Up above is a chart from that Treasury Department analysis. As you can see, the bottom 40% not only don't pay income taxes (the red line), they are actually receiving money from the government (shown as negative taxes). And the top 1% of earners are paying more than anyone else, around 23% in income taxes. If you include corporate income taxes (many in the top 1% own businesses) then the total federal tax rate paid by the top 1% is around 31.5%. There is no teacher, sanitation worker or nurse who is paying that amount.

“But again, this isn't something Biden just rolled out last night. He was fact-checked repeated on this same claim including when he used it in last year's State of the Union. Here's FactCheck.org from last February:

“But no billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher or a firefighter,” Biden said in his Feb. 7 State of the Union address, calling on Congress to “pass my proposal for the billionaire minimum tax.”...

Biden’s statements refer to a White House economic analysis that included earnings on unsold stock as income...

...when looking only at income, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in the income groups below them. The top 0.1% of earners, with more than $4.4 million in expanded cash income, pay an average rate of 25.1% in federal income and payroll taxes, according to the TPC chart. Those in the middle 20%, with income between $59,700 and $105,900, pay an average of 12.3%.

But the current tax system does not tax earnings on assets, such as stock, until that asset is sold, at which point they are subject to capital gains taxes. Until stocks and assets are sold, any earnings are referred to as “unrealized” gains.

“ Even Politifact got this right in July of 2022, yet another occasion when Bide made this same claim.

"Billionaires in America — there’s 789 or thereabouts. You know what average federal income tax they pay? 8%," Biden said July 6. "Every one of you have a job (in which you pay) more than 8% (in taxes) — every single one of you. If you’re a cop, a teacher, a firefighter, union worker, you probably pay two to three times that."

However, tax specialists say that Biden’s comparison is faulty. First, the 8% figure is a lowball estimate that uses a hypothetical calculation. And second, Biden’s statement ignores that most of the middle-income households he’s referring to pay tax rates of between zero and 15%.

The White House report found that if you include unrealized gains in the income calculations of the 400 richest U.S. families, then their taxes paid would account for just 8.2% of their income.

Economists and policymakers have long debated whether the government should tax unrealized gains. But Biden made it sound like 8% was the standard rate today, not what would happen under a future proposal.

:”Finally, the Washington Post pointed out in January that Biden has made this bogus claim about billionaires and taxes more than 30 times: [emphasis added]

In the past year, in more than 30 appearances, the president has referred to billionaires paying about 8 percent in federal income taxes. He said it in his last State of the Union address, and odds are he will say it again when he addresses Congress in March...

But if you check Treasury Department calculations for what the richest Americans already pay in taxes, you would see that the top 1 percent pay in excess of 20 percent in income taxes and more than 30 percent in all federal taxes. Even if you drill down to the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers — data that was publicly available on an annual basis until President Donald Trump killed the report — they paid an effective tax rate of 23.1 percent in 2014. These taxpayers — with $127 billion of income — that year paid $29.4 billion in income taxes, or more than 2 percent of all income taxes, the IRS said. That’s more than the bottom 70 percent of taxpayers combined.

Biden's 8% claim is part of a tax system we don't have and which no other wealthy country has. The whole premise of his comments are false. Whether you look at the top 1% or even the top 0.001%, they are in fact paying their fair share of income taxes. Those 400 billionaires are paying more in federal taxes than the bottom 70% of taxpayers.

FWIW:

Biden — and .Elizabeth Warren, another advocate for taxing unrealized capital gains — don’t mention that Musk paid $11 billion in federal taxes in 2022, the largest tax payment by an individual in the history of the United States. (He also paid an additional huge sum to California; another reason he moved to Texas.)

Biden has always been a liar; in fact, he built his career by lying, from being raised in the black church (or Puerto Rican, depending on the audience); being arrested in South Africa while he marched in support of Nelson Mandela; graduating at the top of his law school class (he finished in the bottom third), teaching Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania; travelling 12,000 miles with Chairman Xe; never discussing Hunter’s business (sic) deals with China; and, of course, his adventures with Corn Pop.

The two most revealing lies, showing exactly the man he is, are his exploitation of personal loss to advance his career. For decades, he told, and is probably still telling, audiences that his first wife and daughter were killed by a drunken truck driver when in fact, the accident investigation showed that the truck driver was completely sober and the cause of the tragedy was Mrs. Biden’s unexpectedly and without warning turning directly in front of the truck. For years, the children of that that diver have pleaded with him to stop besmirching the name of their late father — he hasn’t. Just as despicable is Biden’s repeated claim that his son Beau was killed in Iraq. He wasn’t; he died of brain cancer in Maryland.

None of these lies are the confused ramblings of an old man; they were as deliberate as his present lie about “the rich”.

The Democrats’ media branch is, of course, right there to repeat and amplify this lie. “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things” CBS spokesman Dan Rather has insisted, and his network obviously agrees. (He also said “(Obama's) a nice person, he's very articulate this is what's been used against him, but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic”, which, although not germane to this discussion, is both amusing and telling).

Biden sucks.

UPDATE. Hell, might as well add this: