Lazy or lying

Now, I don't have interns. So while I knew Brooksie had the facts wrong in Tuesday's column regarding the Obama tax plan, I was too busy to track down the real numbers. And so I waited for the mighty blogosphere to look it up, and fortunately, TPM has a few resources of their own.

David Brooks made an important mistake in his Tuesday column about Barack Obama's fund raising. He writes: "If Obama's tax plans go through, those affluent donors could wind up giving over 50 percent of their income to the federal government."

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of Obama's tax plan, the correct share for the richest 1 percent of households--those with income above $600,000--is 36 percent; for the for the richest 0.1 percent, above $2.9 million, the rate would be 39 percent. Note also that since these estimates include taxes remitted by corporations, the actual tax returns that these households fill out would find them paying less than 30 percent of their income in taxes. Even with Senator Obama's proposal to raise Social Security taxes on those with earnings above $250,000, a proposal for which he has yet to specify a rate, tax liabilities of the affluent would still be far below 50 percent of their income.

It's also worth noting that these tax rates for those at the top of the scale are about the same as those that prevailed under Bill Clinton's presidency (average for the top 1 percent, 1993-2000: 35 percent), a period of strong and broadly shared economic growth.

I encourage you to keep reading the analysis of Brooks's column, which is really all about his deep thinking on Obama's donor base and Brooks's snide (yet oblique) implication that Obama's lying. He's not, and it ain't all that complicated.

My larger point is that while I don't have interns, columnists for the Times do. I'm pretty sure Brooks has at his disposal interns and researchers who, even if they're outsourced to Bangalore, could easily track down the facts about Obama's tax proposals and could do the simple math on Obama's unprecedented support by small donors.

So what gives? You think Brooks is being...ahem...dishonest?

And once again, the great cry rises up in the land, though it fails to pierce the heights on 52nd St.: Don't they fact check these guys?