Liberal Talk Radio

Or, why the Heritage Foundation is full of hacks.

Andrew Sullivan approvingly cites a paragraph from this Heritage Foundation Report:

More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent.[2] On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004

Okay, before you fall asleep, think about this for a second. The top 20% of Americans saw their tax burden increase from 52 percent of all taxes to 66 percent of all taxes: a leap of about 21 percent. Pity them! Unless, of course, you follow the footnotes at the bottom of the Heritage report all the way to this pesky spreadsheet, where you learn that, over the same period of time, that top quintile saw their income shoot from $108,000 to $156,000, an increase of about 50 percent!. So yeah, they’re paying 21 percent more in taxes, but they’re also earning 50 percent more in income. So the percentage of income actually paid in taxes has gone down. Way down. I’d take that deal any day.

It’s this kind of scrutiny that separates hack-jobs like Heritage from reality-based think tanks like Brookings. And that’s exactly why Brookings gets tarred as “liberal” by Fox News and others. Because they use facts.