It’s easy enough to dismiss Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endless lament that the rich don’t “pay their fair share of taxes,” but he should still be held to account when he flat-out lies about how much the rich do pay.

In an op-ed published by the Guardian, Sanders repeats a number of leftist tropes: income inequality has never been greater, the Trump tax cuts benefited the rich and big corporations, the middle class is getting screwed. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

But then he starts making some remarkable claims.

He says that Warren Buffett’s tax rate is 0.1%, “while the average schoolteacher paid 9.8%.”

Elon Musk, he says, faced a tax rate of 3.3%. Jeff Bezos’ is less than 1%. Michael Bloomberg’s is 1.3%, while “the average registered nurse paid 13.3%.”

If that seems too outrageous to be true, that’s because it is.

Those numbers are based on an analysis by the leftist ProPublica, which compared the taxes paid by these billionaires with their wealth, not their income.

But as anyone who pays taxes knows, the government taxes income, not some fanciful measure of wealth.

That same ProPublica report shows that from 2014 to 2018, Buffett paid $23.7 million in taxes, against an income of $125 million. That’s a tax rate of 19%.

Jeff Bezos paid $973 million in taxes on income of $4.22 billion. That’s a 23% tax rate.

Musk’s tax rate was even higher – 30% – since he paid $455 million on income of $1.52 billion.

So how did ProPublica manage to force their “true tax rates” down to near zero? Simple, they estimated how much their wealth had increased over those same years using estimates compiled by Forbes of the value of their stock, property, and other holdings, then said that, because those “gains” weren’t taxed, their “true” rates are super low.

But measures of wealth are meaningless when it comes to taxes, because they reflect the value of their investments at a given time, which can go up and down, sometimes wildly, in a matter of days. When Donald Trump announced his tariff plan last April, for example, the richest 500 saw their wealth plunge by $500 billion in 48 hours.

In a year when Musk’s or Bezos’ or Buffett’s net worth goes down – which does happen – their “true tax rate” would be astronomical.

But don’t expect Sanders to ever praise them for that. Instead, he wants to grab a chunk of that wealth with a confiscatory – and probably unconstitutional – 5% tax on the value of all the stock, real estate, etc., that they hold.

Of course, there are other falsehoods that Sanders peddles. The idea that a 5% wealth tax on 938 billionaires would bring in $4.4 trillion over 10 years is fanciful, at best, given that the wealth tax itself would – if it weren’t found unconstitutional – instantly destroy much of the value of their holdings. Not to mention the fact that many billionaires would simply relocate themselves and their businesses to other countries that don’t confiscate wealth.

And remember that Sanders doesn’t want to use this new money to pay down the massive national debt, but wants instead to vastly expand entitlement programs – and he has a long list, from free health care to more generous Medicare and Medicaid benefits to a massive expansion in housing subsidies. That would only add to the debt crisis.

The bigger lie in all this is that the rich don’t pay their fair share of income taxes. As IRS data show, the rich arguably pay far more than their fair share of taxes.

In 2023, the top 0.1% of income earners accounted for 10% of all income earned but paid almost 20% of all federal income taxes. The top 1% paid 47%. The bottom 50% of income earners paid less than 4% of federal income taxes.

And this doesn’t count the taxes that the rich generate by starting businesses, paying employees, buying goods and services, and growing the economy.

Sanders is right that the public largely supports the idea of a wealth tax. But that’s only because they’ve been fed a steady diet of lies like the ones he keeps serving up.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board