One of the sad constants of American political debate is that, anytime the tax rate on the rich is to be either raised or lowered, Republicans will repeat a certain statistic. To wit, “The Stat” is that the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all income taxes. Conservatives consider this fact a dispositive justification either against any proposal to increase taxes on the rich, or in favor of any plan to reduce it. Over just the past day, I have seen it circulating — here, here, here, everywhere.
It is a figure that has been repeated a million times on Fox News diatribes and in College Republican lectures sponsored by aging billionaires. It is one of the handful of debate-enders, like “Ronald Reagan defeated communism” or “gun controls don’t stop crime,” that any good Republican apparatchik has at his fingertips.
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