New data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show that President Obama’s much-discussed Buffett Rule, which would require families earning more than $1 million a year to pay an effective tax rate of 30 percent, is basically in effect.
The data also show that President Obama’s premise for pushing the tax—that the rich pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than the middle class—is faulty. The top 1 percent of income earners pays almost three times as much tax as a percentage of their incomes as the middle class.
