Lies, damn lies, and tax statistics

Reading through the Sunday letters to the N&O today, it seems that all the Republican letters were on the same talking points.  I can only assume that it’s what Fox or Rush has been pushing.  Short version: poor rich people paying such a high proportion of the nation’s taxes.  Of course, not a single letter writer is honest enough or smart enough to put this in the context of the high proportion of wealth the richest Americans account for.  Simpy saying that the top 10% pay 90% of the taxes means almost nothing without knowing what proportion of the income they generate.  One letter mentions that the top 1% paid a higher share under GWB than under Clinton.  Note to conservative everyhhere: the richest 1% pulled in a higher share of our national income under GWB than Clinton.

Now, of course Democrats are not immune from mis-using statistics to strengthen their argument, but the pervasiveness and fundamental dishonesty of this common conservative trope on taxes is especially annoying and surely not matched by anything from the left side of the political spectrum.

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