Moron of the Day

—By Kevin Drum

| Tue Mar. 3, 2009 9:14 AM PST
The competition for dumbest news story of day/week/month is way too competitive to ever declare a definitive winner.  But Jon Chait sure has a contender today, a piece by ABC's Emily Friedman that's based on the idea that the tax rate on your entire income will jump under Obama's proposed tax reform if your income exceeds $250,000.  Supposedly this makes it worthwhile to get your income a few pennies under the limit, and supposedly lots of people are working on this.  Needless to say, though, the tax code doesn't work this way.  Only the income above $250,000 will be taxed at the higher rate:

The article [] quotes a financial advisor who explains the way that tax brackets rates work, but then quotes a right-wing business professor and the subjects of her article fulminating about class warfare. Pretty clearly the reporter started off on her mistaken premise, found some subjects who shared her ignorance, and then came across a financial advisor who gently corrected her. But, instead of nixing the collosally uninformed article, or writing a different kind of article ("Rich Morons Decreasing Own Income Due To Lack of Tax Code Knowledge") she instead plowed ahead with her initial premise.

Friedman's piece is a train wreck.  What happened to ABC News' editors on this one?

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Kevin Drum

Political Blogger

Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. RSS |

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