Another tweet from President Joe Biden’s official Twitter account has been fact-checked, this time for claiming that average billionaires do not pay their “fair share” of taxes.
Biden made the claim on Saturday, using one of the left’s favorite arguments about the rich paying their “fair share.”
“Look, I think you should be able to be a billionaire if you can earn it, but just pay your fair share,” the tweet from Biden’s official Twitter account read.
“I think you ought to pay a minimum of 25%. It’s about basic fairness,” the tweet concluded.
The tweet included a graphic containing a paraphrased message from Biden’s State of the Union address on February 7.
“No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or firefighter,” the message read.
The graphic went on to claim that “average billionaires” pay only 3%.
Look, I think you should be able to be a billionaire if you can earn it, but just pay your fair share.
I think you ought to pay a minimum tax of 25%.
It’s about basic fairness. pic.twitter.com/oHgreYCdUz
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 18, 2023
The tweet has roughly 18.7 million views as of Sunday evening, and now includes a “Community Note” that assesses the tweet as “inaccurate.”
According to Twitter, the Community Notes feature “aims to create a better-informed world, by empowering people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.”
The Community Note attached to Biden’s tweet initially included links to three fact-checking sources that debunk the president’s claims.
“This claim has been repeatedly assessed as inaccurate. It relies on a theoretical calculation that treats unrealized capital gains (increase in the value of unsold stocks) as income even though current tax law does not. (Taxes occur once stocks are sold for profit.),” the Community Note originally stated, according to The Blaze.
The note has since been updated with direct figures debunking Biden’s claims.
“This is incorrect. Avg income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6%. Top 1% of taxpayers paid a 25.99% avg rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1% avg rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers. It increased from 20.1%/2019 to 22.2%/2020,” the fact-check read, linking to a 2023 Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data from the Tax Foundation.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a billionaire who also owns Tesla and SpaceX, also provided a personal fact-check in a response to Biden’s tweet.
“I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average!” Musk wrote.
“I also paid more income tax than anyone ever in the history of Earth for 2021 and will do that again in 2022,” the tech billionaire added, referring to a previous tweet in which he revealed that he had paid “more than $11 billion in taxes for the year.”
I certainly agree that everyone should pay taxes and not engage in elaborate tax-avoidance schemes.
Would be curious to hear how these other “billionaires” are so good at avoiding taxes!
We should get rid of GRATs, but maybe other things too.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2023
This is far from the first time that Elon Musk’s Twitter has fact-checked Biden. One particular tweet was even deleted by the White House after Community Notes pointed out that the information in the tweet actually made Biden look worse.
The initial tweet claimed that seniors would be receiving “the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership.”
Unfortunately for the White House, the fact-check pointed out that the increase was actually due to skyrocketing inflation under Biden, as the checks had to keep up with the increase in the annual cost of living adjustment.
