The RW nut at dinner last night... or...I've never heard this one!

[AlbertCat]

I'm out to dinner with friends and their new aquantance...we'll just call him Joe the Confused. So during the evening Joe informs us that only

"50% of the population pay 100% of taxes"

I of course challenged this absurdity. He means 50% of those required to pay taxes not the "population" I ask. Then I say, "where did you hear that?"

I get a tirade about how I must get my news from the (unreliable implied) Liberal Media :eyes: and all I have to do is "Go to the IRS site on the Web and it's all right there." "Where on the IRS site? It's a big site!" "Just go there!" Now comes my friends frantically changing the subject.

After dinner I did go to the IRS site and found a category entitled "The Tax Gap". That looks right. It informs me in the section "Update on Reducing the Federal Tax Gap
and Improving Voluntary Compliance" that in 2008 "The IRS has estimated the overall voluntary compliance rate to be approximately 84 percent."

http://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/tax_gap_report_-final_version.pdf


Well, that 50% crap was easily debunked! Maybe Joe should go to the IRS site himself before sending others.

But where did this 50% meme come from? Where did he see it, 'cause it wasn't on the IRS site? So I did a search for "50% pay 100% of taxes" and I end up here!

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/guess-who-really-pays-the-taxes

The American Enterprise Institute....a RW think tank. In this article, the author shows that the Bush tax cuts actually made it so the top 2% actually PAID MORE than they did before, another point Joe made. Whatever. I am not inclined to wade thru the article considering its source.

Has anyone else heard this crap from the right? The article over at AEI is not new. Why would it come up now?