Joe Biden is under fire from fact-checkers – yet again – over his claim that billionaires pay only a 3% tax rate.
His claim was posted on social media over the weekend and said, “No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or a firefighter.”
Actually, he probably meant a lower tax rate.
Look, I think you should be able to be a billionaire if you can earn it, but just pay your fair share.
I think you ought to pay a minimum tax of 25%.
It’s about basic fairness. pic.twitter.com/oHgreYCdUz
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 18, 2023
The New York Post pointed out that his statistic was “questionable.”
It explained, “It is unclear where the 3% figure came from, and it contradicts figures the White House has issued in the past. In February, the White House issued a fact sheet called ‘The Biden Economic Plan Is Working,’ which calculated how much tax the U.S. could collect if it counted unrealized gains – a potential profit on an unsold asset – as income.”
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At that time, Biden claimed billionaires pay “just 8%.”
The report noted Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, has explained, “Using the existing definition of taxable income, really rich people pay an average federal income tax rate in the mid-20s. If you want to include unrealized gains in your denominator, as the White House does, the average rate would go way down.”
In the report, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who also holds control of SpaceX and Tesla, said, “I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average!”
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley, whose testimony on legal issues has been solicited for Congress numerous times, called Biden’s claim was “bogus.”
“Joe Biden this weekend proved the truth to the old adage that there are ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ Biden is again arguing that the wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes.”
He described Biden’s latest claim as a “whopper” and said it was “truly beyond the pale even for politics.”
He pointed out in America more than 40% of households pay no federal taxes at all, and the top 1% pay 40% of tax revenues. Actually, the top 25% of earners paid almost 90% of all taxes in 2020.
He said Biden, to get that figure, apparently includes unrealized gains in his calculations.
But that, Turley said, “is downright dishonest.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Long the world’s most Christian nation, America today is being taken over by a new “official” national religion, one being imposed on the entire populace by every major societal institution, from government, media and big tech, to academia, entertainment and business.
This new state religion is Wokeism. “Going woke” conjures up visions of someone claiming to be acutely sensitive (“awake”) to “systemic social and political injustice.” And not just alleged bigotry against blacks, but toward every other “minority” as well, from LGBT folk – especially everything transgender and “nonbinary” – to “undocumented immigrants.” All of them, being VICTIMS, intrinsically more virtuous than the shameful oppressor class: primarily heterosexual white males
This new “woke” consciousness has turned America upside-down – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, to tearing down of historic monuments, to demanding multi-million-dollar reparation payments for blacks, to appointing transgenders as top government officials, to rampant reverse discrimination in every area of life, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory “diversity training” and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet.
Yet there is hope. Being “saved” – which in Wokeism is called being “woke” – is largely a matter of worshipping victimhood by becoming an “ally” and “defender” of all the many victim classes, and a determined enemy of the straight white male oppressor class. Thus, “joining the righteous” as an ally – even if one is cursed to be a straight white male – opens the door mercifully for salvation, even to the most wretched.
That is the power of the religion of Wokeism. And it’s explored as never before in the February 2023 issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine. If you’ve ever wondered, for example, exactly how the most radical elements in American society are successfully pressuring the biggest corporations into adopting the most outrageous and immoral policies imaginable, even when doing so permanently damages and devalues the company, the stunning answers are in this issue of Whistleblower, titled “WOKEISM: AMERICA’S OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION.”
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