beretta304
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On CBS News’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, President Obama said, “Taxes are lower on families than they've been probably in the last 50 years. So I haven't raised taxes.”
As of Monday morning, neither the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-awarding Fact-Checker, nor the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, nor the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Politifact.com had risen to this opportunity, so let us take a stab.
There are a variety of possible ways to measure the tax burden on American “families” over the past 50 years. Fortunately, Mr. Obama’s own White House Office of Management and Budget provides a spreadsheet that summarizes federal tax receipts from 1940 through the present. Fifty years ago, in 1962, federal tax receipts were $99.7 billion. In 2011, they were $2.3 trillion. Far from being at a 50-year low, the taxes extracted from American families last year were about 23 times what they were fifty years ago.
It would be a shame if voters fall for Mr. Obama’s misleading claim that their taxes are at a 50-year low. But who can blame the voters, or, for that matter, the fact-checkers, if even Mr. Obama’s opponent, Mitt Romney, buys into the idea. In the same “60 Minutes” program, Mr. Romney said taxes would remain essentially unchanged if he won. “I don’t want a reduction in revenue coming into the government,” Mr. Romney said.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/stoll-60-minutes-obama/2012/09/24/id/457361
As of Monday morning, neither the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-awarding Fact-Checker, nor the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, nor the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Politifact.com had risen to this opportunity, so let us take a stab.
There are a variety of possible ways to measure the tax burden on American “families” over the past 50 years. Fortunately, Mr. Obama’s own White House Office of Management and Budget provides a spreadsheet that summarizes federal tax receipts from 1940 through the present. Fifty years ago, in 1962, federal tax receipts were $99.7 billion. In 2011, they were $2.3 trillion. Far from being at a 50-year low, the taxes extracted from American families last year were about 23 times what they were fifty years ago.
It would be a shame if voters fall for Mr. Obama’s misleading claim that their taxes are at a 50-year low. But who can blame the voters, or, for that matter, the fact-checkers, if even Mr. Obama’s opponent, Mitt Romney, buys into the idea. In the same “60 Minutes” program, Mr. Romney said taxes would remain essentially unchanged if he won. “I don’t want a reduction in revenue coming into the government,” Mr. Romney said.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/stoll-60-minutes-obama/2012/09/24/id/457361
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