NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn't happen this week
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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CLAIM: Biden’s tax rate on a family making $75,000 dollars a year would go from 12% to 25%.
THE FACTS: False posts circulating on Facebook and Twitter claim that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has proposed a staggering tax increase for families making $75,000 a year. A current federal tax rate of 12 percent applies to families making up to $80,000, or individuals making up to $40,000. That would still apply under Biden, who has vowed publicly not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. “Nobody making under $400,000 bucks would have their taxes raised. Period. Bingo,” Biden said in an interview on CNBC in May. Biden has proposed increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. He has also proposed a 12.4 percent Social Security tax for income above $400,000, in addition to rolling back the 2018 tax cuts that President Donald Trump signed into law for those making $400,000 or more. An analysis of his tax plan performed by University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model in March found that the bottom 90 percent of income earners would not pay more in federal income taxes under Biden’s proposal. Another analysis of Biden’s tax plan by the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C., predicted a slight increase for the bottom 99 percent of earners. On average, the report said earners in varying brackets could pay between an extra $30 to $590, as a result of Biden’s tax plan. But that increase, the Tax Policy Center said, would not be the result of Biden directly raising taxes on those earners. Instead, the Tax Policy Center...