Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: The AP Releases Misleading Analysis of Obama’s Tax Plan says the following:
As Hanlon noted, “AP’s ‘fact check’ misses the point of the Buffett rule. The point is not to ensure that rich people on average pay higher taxes than middle-class people on average,” but “to ensure that all households with incomes above $1 million pay at least what middle-class families are paying.”
This is not the first time this month that the AP’s “fact-checkers” have bungled the facts regarding Obama’s economic plans. At this rate, they should think about opening a new division to fact-check the fact-checkers.
This is no surprise to me. When I saw the headline for the AP story, I didn’t even bother to read the story. I knew that it would be a distortion.
After reading the exposé, I decided to follow the link to the AP story, FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries? Here is the red-flag.
On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.
What does that even mean? How did they take the average? Did they average the percentages of all the included taxpayers? Did they weight the averages by the amount of income earned by each tax payer? When the income of people making more than $1 million ranges from that $1 million to several billion dollars, then the average weighted by income is quite skewed from the average weighted by the numbers of taxpayers in each category.
When the article uses such imprecise terms, you know the article is an example covered by Greenberg’s Law Of The Media.
Another of the many red flags in the article include:
The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That is what I call half a statistic. They don’t say it, but they obviously want you to infer that 10% of the households paying 70% of the federal income taxes is too much taxation. To know if this inference is correct, you’d have to know what fraction of the income these 10% of households make, but they don’t tell you that. Even if they did tell you about the declared income, they would be leaving out the unrealized capital gains of these wealthy people which may dwarf the income the IRS requires them to report as income. So to paraphrase Bill Clinton “It all depends on what the meaning of income is.”
Of course the quote is not going to emphasize that paying only 50% of federal taxes while paying 70% of all federal income taxes means that there are other hefty federal taxes other than income taxes that the less wealthy pay in larger percentages than the wealthy.
To use these tricks in their article, you would almost have to conclude that the article is purposely distorting the facts or the authors are totally ignorant of how they are misusing the numbers. Personally, I don’t need people to report the news who know less about it than I do. I certainly don’t need reporters who tell lies in their reports.
Click on the link under categories at the right side of this window for Greenberg’s Law Of The Media to see other articles in that category. In the set of articles that come up, you might notice Associated Press the Faux Noise of the Print Media.