Obama's untrue populist statements on taxes and who pays them


Peter Ferrara:

President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation Monday night was highly disturbing. Because read carefully, it reveals a president wildly divorced from the fundamental realities of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

President Obama actually told America on national television that it is a nation “with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few.” It is incomprehensible how a man serving as president of these United States could make such a fundamentally false assertion about his own country.

As I explain in my new book, America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, before Obama was even elected, official IRS data showed that for 2007 the top 1% of income earners paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95% combined. The top 1% paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes that year, almost twice their share of income. The middle fifth of income earners, the actual middle class, paid 4.7% of federal income taxes. Deck stacked against the middle class in favor of the wealthiest few?

Moreover, the bottom 40% of income earners as a group paid no federal income taxes that year. They instead received net payments from the IRS equal to 4% of total federal tax revenues. As my book explains, this was actually the result of nearly 30 years of Reaganomics. Today close to 50% of Americans pay no federal income tax.

...
There is more.

It is a point I have raised before. The rich are are already paying more than their fair share of the taxes. Just what percent would Obama think would be fair if 95 percent is not enough. It is a question I want to see put to him at one of these press conferences. If not their, the Republican candidates should raise the issue. It is a good way to cut through the populist demagoguery coming out of the White House.

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