Fact-Checking the Wall Street Journal’s  “Fairness Quiz for the President” Obama mentions “fairness” so often in his speeches that the word featured in State of the Union drinking games. Taking Obama’s fairness rhetoric as a provocation, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore has come up with a highly partisan “fairness quiz,” a series of questions designed to prove that under Obama, wealthy Americans suffer an unfairly huge tax burden. Moore asks, Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax? This question - and in fact, all of Moore’s questions - are deliberately silent on whether Obama has raised the tax in question, or is responsible for the situation in question in any way whatsoever. (In this case, he hasn’t, and he’s not.) And some of the “quiz” questions omit inconvenient facts that undermine Moore’s narrative of overtaxed rich folk. For instance, he asks emotively, Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money…must then pay an additional estate tax of 35%…when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones? The question implies that the estate tax affects everyone, but actually, it only affects estates of over $5,000,000 dollars.
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Fact-Checking the Wall Street Journal’s  “Fairness Quiz for the President”

Obama mentions “fairness” so often in his speeches that the word featured in State of the Union drinking games.

Taking Obama’s fairness rhetoric as a provocation, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore has come up with a highly partisan “fairness quiz,” a series of questions designed to prove that under Obama, wealthy Americans suffer an unfairly huge tax burden. Moore asks,

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

This question - and in fact, all of Moore’s questions - are deliberately silent on whether Obama has raised the tax in question, or is responsible for the situation in question in any way whatsoever. (In this case, he hasn’t, and he’s not.)

And some of the “quiz” questions omit inconvenient facts that undermine Moore’s narrative of overtaxed rich folk. For instance, he asks emotively,

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money…must then pay an additional estate tax of 35%…when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

The question implies that the estate tax affects everyone, but actually, it only affects estates of over $5,000,000 dollars.