Beulah, peel me a grape

Here at the lavish Biteme World Headquarters and Auto Showroom, we were much heartened by economist Gene Simmons’ recent announcement:

The 1 percent pays 80 percent of all taxes. Fifty percent of the population of the U.S. pays no taxes. The 1 percent provides all the jobs for everybody else. If the 1 percent didn’t exist, there would be chaos and the American economy would drop dead.

Gene Simmons a/k/a Chaim Witz a/k/a The Demon in his pre-economist days

Gene Simmons a/k/a Chaim Witz a/k/a The Demon in his pre-economist days

Imagine how disappointed we were to hear that Simmons was wrong. It turns out that the 1 percent pays much less than 80% of all taxes. And much less than 50% of the population of the U.S. pays no taxes.

I don’t know where Simmons got his figure for the jobs created by the one percenters, but of about 140,000,000 total US employed, 20,000,000 are employed by government.

Unfortunately, Simmons won’t be getting that Nobel Prize in economics this year, but he did rate 4 Pinocchios from the Fact Checker.

4 Pinocchios for a rocker’s off-base claims about taxes and the ’1 percent’ – The Washington Post.

See also Cecil Adams’ “Do the rich pay very little tax? Wouldn’t a flat tax be fairer?”

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