In the first Nuze item, I already highlighted a particularly asinine part of Obama’s speech:

This is the height of unfairness.  It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay a higher tax rate than somebody pulling in $50 million.  It is wrong for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett.

To go along with this quote, here is another part of Obama’s campaign speech that is worthy of your attention.  Most Americans would think nothing of it.  But for those of us who can see through his crap, you’ll find that Obama is pretty much full of it.

Now, keep in mind, when President Clinton first proposed these tax increases, folks in Congress predicted they would kill jobs and lead to another recession.  Instead, our economy created nearly 23 million jobs and we eliminated the deficit.  Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century.  This isn’t like in the early 50s, when the top tax rate was over 90%, or even the early 80s, when it was about 70%.  Under President Clinton, the top rate was only about 39%.  Today, thanks to loopholes and shelters, a quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households.  Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1%.  One percent.

This one is a doozy.  Looks like we are going to have to break it down …

First, this claim about the Clinton tax increases leading to job creation.  We happened to put this rumor to bed somewhat recently in Nealz Nuze.  The fact is that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes actually slowed economic growth.  From 1993 until 1997, the economy grew at a pedestrian 3.3% per year – a number Barack Obama would kill for.  But what happened after 1997?  Tax cuts!  The top capital gains rate was cut from 28% to 20%, among other cuts.  Here’s what happened as a result, according to the Heritage Foundation: “Business investment skyrocketed after the tax cut, and the economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.4 percent (33 percent faster than after the Clinton tax hike) from 1997 through the end of the Clinton presidency. Real wages reversed their downward trend and grew 1.7 percent per year during the same time.” 

And about Clinton eliminating the deficit.  Time for a little painful truth.  The surplus? It never existed. It was never there. The surplus was nothing more than a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office in 2001 as to what was going to happen over the next 10 years. This prediction was based on several assumptions.  First, the economic growth of the late 1990s and the growth in the Dow would continue generating record tax revenues.  Second, the surplus prediction was based on the improbable idea that discretionary spending would fall to levels last seen in the 1930s. The CBO prediction also failed to take into account terrorist attacks and the resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now onto this claim that “the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century.  This isn’t like in the early 50s, when the top tax rate was over 90%, or even the early 80s, when it was about 70%.”  Do you think Obama actually believes we were paying taxes at those rates or is he not telling us then entire truth?

Anybody who will simply look at a chart of federal tax income rates and determine that taxes were higher in the 50s must have been educated in government schools.  Income tax rates only tell part of the story: According to the Tax Foundation, more than two-thirds of all taxes paid by Americans in 2010 will be something other than income taxes.  We must also consider payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, deductions, all of which play a role in the amount of money government collects and the burden it places on its citizens.  So PolitiFact found a way to analyze our tax burden …

There is another way -- calculating all taxes paid by Americans and dividing the sum by the nation's total income. To make this calculation, we turned to the Tax Foundation's annual "Tax Freedom Day" report, which offers calculations of total tax burden going back to 1900. (There was no federal income tax then, but there were state and other taxes.)

The foundation's expected tax burden for 2010 is 26.9 percent, up slightly from the 2009 tax burden of 26.6 percent. (This is not unusual: The tax burden typically falls during recessions, as taxpayers move to lower tax brackets.)

Under Eisenhower, that figure ranged from 24.8 percent to 27.7 percent, with the figure lower than 26.9 percent for seven out of eight years. So by this measurement, the tax burden was lower most of the time under Eisenhower.

And then we have this complete fallacy of millionaires paying at lower tax rates than millions in the middle-class.  You know the trickery Obama is pulling on you here.  He is referring to millionaires paying capital gains taxes versus middle class Americans who pay income taxes.  When you dig deep into the numbers, you will realize that the effective tax burden on millionaires is, on average, much higher than middle class tax payers.  According to the Tax Foundation, “For the entire universe of American taxpayers, the average tax rate is 11 percent of our AGI. The highest average tax rate paid by anyone earning under $100,000 is 8 percent. That shows how successful the myriad tax credits available to the "middle-class" have been in reducing their tax burdens.  By contrast, millionaires pay an average rate of 25 percent.”