They don’t call Elizabeth Warren Lieawatha for nothing. The Democrat presidential candidate has a talent for speaking with a forked tongue.
The latest in Warren’s long list of fibs, uttered during last week’s Democrat debate but largely missed by the leftist media, is that billionaires are “freeloaders.” They loaf and live, Warren said, off the income of others. Whether Warren includes the billionaires who will back her candidacy should she win the Democrat nomination for president we are not given to know.
We do know, though, that if Warren isn’t deliberately lying about “billionaires,” she is completely unfamiliar with or incapable of understanding federal tax data.
Warren’s Comments and the Data
Warren struggled most recently with the truth during an exchange with Senator Cory Booker.
“Today, the 99 percent in America are on track to pay about 7.2 percent of their total wealth in taxes,” Warren said. “The top one-tenth of 1 percent that I want to say pay 2 cents more, they’ll pay 3.2 percent of their total wealth in America. I’m tired of freeloading billionaires. I think it’s time that we ask those at the very top to pay more so that every single one of our children gets a real chance.”
Later, Warren reiterated her point with tweet: “I’m tired of freeloading billionaires. It’s time for the top 1% to chip in their fair share so everyone has a chance to succeed.”
Yet billionaires, of course, aren’t “freeloaders.”
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As one of Warren’s Twitter followers quipped, “When 44% of the population pay 0 in federal income taxes. You may want to rethink who is the freeloader.”
That datum comes from the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of two leftist outfits, the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.
But beside that truth, as the The New American observed when it refuted Representative Ilhan Omar’s similar claims, the top one percent of taxpayers fork over nearly 40 percent of the federal income tax bill. That would include “freeloading” billionaires.
Data from the Internal Revenue Service for 2016, assembled by the Tax Foundation, break down this way:
• The top 50 percent of taxpayers paid 97 percent of individual income taxes. The bottom 50 paid the three percent left over.
• The top one percent paid 37.3 percent of individual income taxes. The bottom 90 percent paid 30.5 percent.
• The individual tax rate for the top one percent was 26.9 percent, more than seven times higher than that of the bottom 50, which was 3.7 percent.
As well, the top five percent of earners paid 58.23 percent of federal income taxes. The top 10 percent paid 69.47, the top 25 percent paid 85.97, and the top 50 percent 96.96.
So no, billionaires aren’t freeloaders, and do indeed, pay their “fair share,” which raises the question of what Warren considers “fair,” and who, in the end, will define it.
Other Lies
But Warren’s mangled mendacities about taxes aren’t the latest or worst of the senator’s departures from the truth.
She won’t tell the truth even about her children. Last week, when a school-choice advocate told Warren that “we are going to have the same choice that you had for your kids because I read that your children went to private schools,” Warren disputed the woman.
“My children went to public schools,” Warren said. Well, in a manner of speaking they did. Or at least her daughter did. Her son, however, attended a tony private school, which now costs $15,000 a year, after fourth grade, The Washington Free Beacon reported. Warren’s campaign confirmed that fact. So again, Warren lied given the clear implication of “my children went to public schools.”
But that fib, like the tax fib, is relatively harmless. Another Warren whopper wasn’t. She accused Darren Wilson, the cop who shot “gentle giant” Michael Brown in 2014, of murder, TNA reported at the time.
“5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri,” the former law professor wrote. “Michael was unarmed yet he was shot 6 times. I stand with activists and organizers who continue the fight for justice for Michael. We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.”
Warren, who taught at Harvard Law School, had to know that tweet was false and defamatory given that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department cleared Wilson of wrongdoing and found that he acted in self defense.
But Warren tweeted the lie anyway.
Hat tip: Powerline
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
