White House admits to lying about billionaire tax rates

Yesterday President Obama gave a speech in Texas, er, I mean Kansas, trashing capitalism and individualism, per usual. Immediately the fact checkers went to work analyzing the details of Obama’s latest verbal assault. Like every other speech, this one was full of lies, intentionally misleading “facts,” demagoguery and anti-Americanism. As you can imagine, I was shocked to read the White House admitted telling a story, well, sort of:

“Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent — 1 percent. That is the height of unfairness.”

This is a striking statistic. But the only evidence that the White House could offer for it was a TV clip of a conversation on Bloomberg TV, in which correspondent Gigi Stone made this assertion during a discussion about the tax strategies that the very wealthy use to avoid paying taxes. The TV clip was promoted by the left-leaning website Think Progress.

Stone quoted from a Bloomberg News article last month that reported on such tax strategies, which mostly involve complicated ways to defer paying capital gains taxes. But the article never made the one-percent claim. It also noted that the IRS had gotten more hostile to such transactions in recent years.

An administration official conceded the White House had no actual data to back up the president’s assertion, but argued that other reports showed that some of the wealthy pay little in taxes.

(h/t PJ Tatler)

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