Bill Maher doth protest too much

On last Friday night's "Real Time with Bill Maher" episode, Mr. Maher made a point of saying, several times, that some people are lying when they claim the rich don't pay taxes (really ENOUGH taxes). He used a statistic like, "81 New Yorkers pay 61 percent of all the taxes the state collects." I likely have not nailed those numbers, but that was the gist.

As I often say about journalists, it turns out that talk show hosts and comedians may also have only a loose grasp of how math works.

At first glance, we might be shocked that so few Americans pay that percentage of the total tax bill and might start thinking, "Hey! They are certainly paying their share."

But the truth is that the statistic is much more likely to indicate the mammoth difference between the wealth of the ultra-rich and everyone else.

Maher has taken some heat for his naïve claim, mostly because he is clearly interested in burnishing his reputation for making everyone a bit angry (and therefore he settled for a superficial claim that does not stand up to any scrutiny). He deserves that criticism, and, of course, he might be a bit disingenuous about his position since he is a multimillionaire himself.

What he didn't or couldn't get into was the more instructive statistic of percentage of income or wealth paid in taxes by various people.

Ten percent of one dollar is always going to be 10 cents, and ten percent of $100 is always going to $10, but the effects of those percentages are nowhere near equal.

I chose ten percent just for simplicity. It turns out that the top one-tenth of one percent average paying about three percent of their total wealth in taxes each year, while everyone else averages over seven percent. 

I can imagine a perfectly fair tax system in which 90 percent of all taxes are paid by a very small number of extraordinarily wealth individuals. Maher was not interested in that possibility, but if we imagine that 100 Americans possess 90 percent of the nation's wealth -- and we are not there... YET -- then it would be completely fair for those 100 people/families to provide 90 percent of tax dollars.

When the bank robber Willie Sutton was captured and asked why he robbed banks, he answered, "Because that's where the money is."

If we need more revenue to provide for the common good, it makes sense to focus on where the money is.