President Obama clueless about teachers’ tax rates.

FactCheck puts it very succinctly:

President Obama’s claim that he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher making $50,000 a year isn’t true. A single taxpayer with $50,000 of income would have paid 11.9 percent in federal income taxes for 2010, while the Obamas paid more than twice that rate — 25.3 percent (and higher rates than that in 2009 and 2008). And if the $50,000-a-year teacher were in Obama’s tax situation — supporting a spouse and two children — he or she would have paid no federal income taxes at all.

What FactCheck is referring to is one of the President’s latest talking points: on at least two occasions in the last few days he’s said “I shouldn’t be paying a lower effective rate than a teacher, or a firefighter, or a construction worker” and “Somebody who’s making $50,000 a year as a teacher shouldn’t be paying a higher effective tax rate than somebody like myself”: obviously, this is complete nonsense.  It’s in fact at  Elizabeth Warren-levels of nonsense*  …but I am very surprised that the fact that the President’s spouting off said nonsense would apparently be a shocking revelation for, well, anyone.

After all, it’s not as if Barack Obama is particularly personally acquainted with a salary that low: his household income in 2000 was merely $240,505 (it went up fairly quickly after that*).  Law professorships likewise pay well, for those wondering about Obama’s previous career path; mind you, things could have been different twenty years ago, but I suspect that things weren’t that different.  Besides: the point here is that the President is not exactly what one could call familiar with the travails of Main Street economic reality, not least because fairly accurate stereotyping has his socioeconomic class spending ever so much time and effort avoiding Main Street like the plague.  Apparently middle-class, bourgeois mentality is contagious…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*You may remember her as being that academic goofball running for MA-SEN, while not really understanding that her tax ‘reform’ program would involve actually making the poor pay some.

**Legitimately enough: Senators are paid quite a bit, and Obama wrote a couple of best-selling books.

4 thoughts on “President Obama clueless about teachers’ tax rates.”

  1. I think I understand why so many lefties have had tax problems, and why they take it so casually: NONE OF THEM PAY THEIR TAXES. Seriously, if Obama had ever worked through his taxes with, say, TurboTax, he’d understand this stuff better. And Warren apparently had no idea she was getting three times the pay she thought…
    .
    Reminds me of the doctrinaire lefty I knew in college, who demanded the “rich pay their share” — while stating he always worked for cash, paid under the table…

  2. Is this a deliberate strategy to gain sympathy by looking so hapless that republicans just look mean for pointing it out? Or to bring so much discredit to the office of the President before he loses it that his successor must spend so much time rebuilding credibility that he can accomplish nothing else?
    Wow, it’s just not **any** fun to mock him, anymore. It’s just **sad**.

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