Taxes

In the days following Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's admission that he pays around 15 percent in federal income taxes, the Obama-loving media have been in a full-court press claiming this is less than what most Americans pay. According to last year's report from the Internal Revenue Service, as a function of Adjusted Gross Income, 97 percent of 2009 filers paid less than 15 percent:

In 1998, we learned that Al and Tipper Gore made $353 in deductible charitable contributions against income of $198,000 the previous year. In the decade from 1998-2007, Joe and Jill Biden averaged $369 per year in such reported contributions. Bill and Hillary Clinton were infamous for taking charitable contributions for used underwear. The aforementioned facts are generally not known by…

The more one listens to Newsweek’s Andrew Sullivan, the more one has to conclude that he either knows absolutely nothing about the economy or he’s lying through his teeth. Appearing on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Wednesday evening, Sullivan actually said tax “revenues currently are at 50 year lows” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

NPR  harped on Mitt Romney's "provocative tax detail" on Wednesday's Morning Edition, highlighting that the GOP presidential candidate "disclosed he's in the same low tax bracket as the billionaire [Warren] Buffett." Correspondent Scott Horsley later used clips from President Obama to accent liberals' class warfare spin about the rich paying a lower tax rate than "millionaires and billionaires…

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward on Wednesday said “tax returns are a character issue.” This occurred during a lengthy Morning Joe discussion about – what else? - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s taxes (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

We'll leave it to others to assess the political fallout from Mitt Romney's statement yesterday that he paid about 15% in federal income taxes.  But let's at least get some facts straight. On Morning Joe today, Joe Scarborough claimed that the revelations about Mitt Romney's taxes might be his Dukakis-in-the-tank moment.  Scarborough repeated the shibboleth Warren Buffett put into…

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has up to this point opted not to make his tax returns public. Not surprisingly, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift smells a rat and expressed her conspiratorial opinion during the predictions segment of PBS's McLaughlin Group Friday (video follows with transcript):

I see that the Associated Press's Derek Kravitz is picking up where his colleague Martin Crutsinger left off in offering up incomplete information and inconvenient truth-avoiding coverage of Uncle Sam's financial results as described in the Monthly Treasury Statement. December's statement, which was released yesterday, showed a deficit of $86 billion and a year-to-date shortfall of $322 billion…

Showing how no left-wing effort to raise taxes is too silly or embarrassing for ABC News to embrace, World News on Wednesday night jumped to promote a Web video, created by a group founded by a former Howard Dean operative and “featured contributor” to the Huffington Post (Rick Jacobs), to impose a higher state income tax rate on Californians earning over $1 million.   “First it was Warren…

In a series of CBS Evening News reports Monday night on how the top Republican presidential contenders plan to reduce the deficit, reporter Dean Reynolds pleaded to Newt Gingrich: “Absolutely no tax increases?” Reynolds proceeded to note “critics are doubtful” about the impact of Gingrich’s plans to reduce regulations and cut federal spending: “They say that fewer regulations could spur some…

Saturday's NBC Nightly News hyped a poll finding that 64 percent of Californians would be willing to pay more taxes "if the money went to public schools." (Video below) Substitute anchor Kate Snow included a plug for the report in the opening teaser: "Tax hike. Why people in one state are saying 'Bring it on.' Tonight, why they're willing to pay more."

Back in 2008 and 2009, the Media Research Center’s year-end awards for the Best Notable Quotables were dominated by journalists fawning over the greatness of Barack Obama. In 2008, our winner for “Quote of the Year” was Chris Matthews for his on-air exclamation that upon hearing Obama give a speech, “I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

As NBC co-anchor Amy Robach teased Saturday's Today show, she described the Republican House's passage of the Senate version of a temporary payroll tax cut extension as President Obama scoring "a win for some 160 million workers." (Video below)

Like so many of her liberal media colleagues, Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson believes cutting payroll taxes for a short period of time stimulates the economy. Fortunately for viewers of PBS's Inside Washington, when she tried to make this absurd conclusion Friday, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer was there to give her and others on the panel a much-needed education (video follows with…