A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shatters the Obama Administration’s myths about “tax fairness.” As  Investor’s Business Daily’s John Merline explains:

President Obama has constantly complained about the rich not paying their "fair share." But a new Congressional Budget Office report shows that the rich were paying more than their fair share of taxes before the numerous hikes he imposed. …

While the top 1% of households accounted for 15% of all income, they paid 35% of all federal income taxes. The bottom 20% accounted for 5.3% of income, but they got more in refundable tax credits, on average, than they paid in income taxes.

Even when you include payroll and other federal taxes, the bottom 20% carried just 0.6% of the total tax burden. …

Yet somehow, mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post manage to report with a straight face that, thanks to Obama's tax hikes, "the very richest Americans are finally shelling out a bit more in federal taxes."

The country is also extremely generous when it comes to writing checks to lower income families. So much so, in fact, that the bottom 40% of households — 48.6 million of them — now get more than half their income in the form of transfer payments, the CBO report shows.


The American Enterprise Institute’s Mark J. Perry aptly sums up by stating that ‘the rich’ don’t just pay their ‘fair share,’ they pay almost everybody’s share.” Perry adds:

We hear all the time from President Obama, Warren Buffett, Robert Reich, and various other Democrats and liberal pundits that “the rich” aren’t paying their fair share and need to be taxed more. …The CBO study released this week provides ample evidence that the richest Americans are paying their “fair share” of federal taxes. In fact, the richest 20% of Americans by income aren’t just paying a share of federal taxes that would be considered “fair” — it goes way beyond “fair” — they’re shouldering almost 100% of the entire federal tax burden of transfer payments and all other non-financed government spending. …

When the top 20% of US households are financing almost 100% of the transfer payments to the bottom 60% and financing almost the entire non-financed operating budget of the federal government, I’d say “the rich” are paying beyond their fair share of the total tax burden, and we might want to start asking if the bottom 60% of “net recipient” households are really paying their fair share.