Follow this link to the Huffington Post story where I first saw the above video

My initial comment on this story was:

I have come to the conclusion that charging Fox News with bias and using sarcasm may be warranted, but it is not the best strategy.

A better strategy might be to pretend Fox News’ (and Florida TV reporter’s) questions were serious questions and address them.

Burton let slide her factoid that the top 25% pay 67% of the taxes. He should have countered that Fox news could instead quote the percentage of income the top 25% get instead of just mentioning that they are the top 25%. In order to judge whether or not they are paying a fair amount of taxes, you have to know how much income they are making. To hide the size of their income is to mislead the public.

It would also be interesting to look at the details of the Rasmussen poll. If you ask the viewers of a network whether or not their channel is biased, this is a measure of how rabid the viewers are. It is not a measure of how biased the network actually is. The viewers of other networks show a reasonable degree of skepticism unlike the viewers of FOX.

I have edited the above quote to get the exact percentages mentioned in the video. A previous post on this blog, United States Income Distribution 1967-2003, shows income distribution, but does not answer the question of taxes versus income. The Tax Foundation has published the tax versus income data for 2002. Back then the top 25% paid 83.6% of income taxes and earned 64.7% of the income. Of course income taxes are not the full measure of taxes.  The lower income groups pay a larger percentage of their income in Social Security, Medicare, and other federal taxes than do the wealthy.  In the really low income groups people pay more for Social Security and Medicare taxes than they pay income taxes. (I know, Social Security is not a tax by some people’s standards depending on what argument you are trying to make.)

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has an article, Recent Tax And Income Trends Among High-income Taxpayers, that discusses the total tax picture as of 2003.

The Treasury analysis shows that the one percent of taxpayers with the highest incomes paid 34.3 percent of federal individual income taxes in 2003.  However, an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office shows that this group paid a substantially smaller proportion — 22.6 percent — of total federal taxes, including payroll, excise, and other taxes.[2]

Even this report does not take into account that higher income groups have more money left over after meeting their basic needs than do lower income people.  I think it only fair that higher income people pay a larger share of the taxes than is represented by their share of income.  The question is, how much?  Given the recent cut in income tax rates for higher income groups and yet they still pay a larger fraction of the total income taxes than they used to shows just how much of the economic pie the top earners are getting.  They must be getting more than 100% of each dollar added to the pie.

Another comment on the Huffington Post found the link to the Rasmussen Poll mentioned in the video.

I found the following statement in the Rasmussen report to be most supportive of my bias:

Other data showed that voters tended to select news sources based upon their political preferences.

It gets better.  The Rasmussen report on selection of news sources has this gem:

Given this polarized environment, we are especially pleased with the bi-partisan audience that visits RasmussenReports.com. Forty-three percent (43%) of our visitors are Republicans while 38% are Democrats.

I don’t think those numbers were typical of the American electorate in 2004 when this report was written.

In my online discussions on the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, I find that most readers find the newspaper biased to the left, whereas I find it biased toward the right. Read this letter to the editor and the ensuing comments. I see more published letters to the editor complaining about left bias than right bias.  Of course the letters that get published are not random representations of the letters received by the newspaper.  Nevertheless, when I see some of the specific complaints about leftward bias, I see some of them have merit.  Maybe the newspaper is just careless in its news analysis pieces.

Talk about Greenberg’s Law of the Media, all these numbers are perfect examples, even the ones that I write.