Joe Biden must hate that Elon Musk took over Twitter because now his lies and those of the Democrats are not going unanswered. People are allowed to respond and opponents are not getting shut down in the same way as they were before.
Now Twitter Community Notes will call out Biden to his face (well, to the face of his account) and not let him get away with some of the nonsensical claims that he has been making. It’s busted him in the past, such as on his continuing lie that Republicans are trying to push cuts in Social Security and Medicare, even though this has been debunked by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Biden was even called out for this from the floor during his State of the Union address.
Biden (or whoever is behind the account) was at it again this weekend, posting a questionable statement about how much billionaires pay in taxes.
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
“Look, I think you should be able to be a billionaire if you can earn it, but just pay your fair share,” Biden tweeted. “I think you ought to pay a minimum tax of 25%. It’s about basic fairness.” The tweet cited one of his quotes, “You know the average tax billionaires pay? Three percent. No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or a firefighter.”
He thinks you should be able to be a billionaire. Well, isn’t that nice? He’s going to let you. It isn’t up to him what you make, although some leftists seem to think they should get to decide that. Then that whole “fair share” just rankles me because he keeps saying it and it’s just so factually ignorant.
According to the independent, non-profit Tax Foundation:
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data indicates that the wealthy in America are bearing the heaviest share of the income tax burden than in any time in recent memory. On the other hand, more than 53 million low- and middle-income taxpayers pay no income taxes after benefiting from record amounts of tax credits, and six out of 10 households receive more in direct government benefits than they pay in all federal taxes.
Twitter Community Notes wasn’t going to let that Biden false statement go by.
— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) March 20, 2023
“This is incorrect,” the note said. Citing the Tax Foundation, they explained, “Avg income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6%. Top 1% of taxpayers paid a 25.99% avg rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1% avg rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers. It increased from 20.1%/2019 to 22.2%/2020.”
Translation? It’s the reverse of what Biden is claiming, it’s the bottom half paying that 3 percent number.
What Biden said even contradicted what the White House has claimed in the past, so he doesn’t even seem to be able to keep the lies straight. The White House has previously claimed that billionaires pay an average rate of just 8 percent, by trying to jack the numbers and include in unrealized gains. They said this in a “fact” sheet they released titled “The Biden Economic Plan Is Working” in February. You know with a title like that, what’s in it can’t amount to much. They also made the 8 percent claim in 2021, claiming the “wealthiest 400 billionaire families” paid an average of “just 8.2 percent of their income — including income from their wealth that goes largely untaxed…”
“Using the existing definition of taxable income, really rich people pay an average federal income tax rate in the mid-20s,” Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman told PolitiFact in July. “If you want to include unrealized gains in your denominator, as the White House does, the average rate would go way down.”
Elon Musk wasn’t just leaving all the debunking to the Twitter Community Notes on this one, he also had a few things to say, based on his own experience.
I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average!
I also paid more income tax than anyone ever in the history of Earth for 2021 and will do that again in 2022.@CommunityNotes, is the 3% number cited above accurate?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2023
“I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average! I also paid more income tax than anyone ever in the history of Earth for 2021 and will do that again in 2022.”
That’s the reality. But truth doesn’t serve the Biden/Democratic purpose of grabbing as much as they can from the wealthy and they’re trying to milk hatred of the rich here. That way they think they can keep spending like drunken sailors and impose their political agenda. But there’s even a limit on what billionaires have and how much they can grab from them, so if you think that this is just aimed at billionaires, you’re missing that this is about grabbing more from all of us.
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