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.
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