Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is a candidate for President and a tax attorney, as she is fond of saying. Her website describes her experience as “five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases.” However, that fact didn’t seem to help her in on the campaign trail in Iowa on Saturday.
The Des Moines Register reports that Bachmann, speaking at a campaign appearance in Ottumwa, said “The average amount of taxes that the average family (paid) was 5 percent overall,” in 1950, as way of saying that the tax burden in America has gone through the roof.
There was only one problem with that argument: the overall tax rate in 1950 was five times that much, and that rate is only a little over three percent higher now.
Yes, she thought nobody would bother to check or to question her, because in the Age Of FOX News, facts are whatever Republicans want them to be at the time. It wasn't the only thing she lied about in Iowa this weekend, either. Of course it's not like anyone really likes to fact check Republicans, because then you get called all sorts of names, so it's just a "miscalculation" on her part and not a deliberate lie:
The Bachmann campaign responded this afternoon that the 5-percent figure comes from the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, and that Bachmann has cited it for several years.
This evening, a campaign spokeswoman provided two documents that she said were the sources Bachmann relied on when making her comments. The spreadsheets, which contained no information identifying their source, show federal, state and local tax receipts as a percentage of the United States’ gross domestic product over the last several decades.
So of course she's magically correct by comparing "tax burdens" to GDP (which is like comparing apples to 18th century Hungarian cabinetmaking) and if you challenge her numbers, you're a horrible person and SHUT UP THAT'S WHY.
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