Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is a candidate for President and a tax attorney, as she is fond of saying. Her website describes her experience as “five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases.” However, that fact didn’t seem to help her in on the campaign trail in Iowa on Saturday.
The Des Moines Register reports that Bachmann, speaking at a campaign appearance in Ottumwa, said “The average amount of taxes that the average family (paid) was 5 percent overall,” in 1950, as way of saying that the tax burden in America has gone through the roof.
There was only one problem with that argument: the overall tax rate in 1950 was five times that much, and that rate is only a little over three percent higher now.
With taxes that low, she continued, her father’s salary from the Air Force was enough to support her entire family. “A sergeant could have a wife and four children and the wife didn’t have to work because you paid 5 percent for your overall tax burden.”
But her figures are not accurate. According to the nonprofit Tax Foundation, the overall tax rate in 1950 was actually 24.6 percent – almost five times the rate cited by Bachmann and just 3.1 percent less than the 2011 tax rate of 27.7 percent.
The error undermines Bachmann’s central point, which is that the tax burden is primarily responsible for forcing both parents to work and other substantial changes to middle-class financial life over the past several decades.
