Quack Statistics.

[steve s]

The April 12 Mallard Fillmore comic said that "The costs of operating the tax system eat up an estimated 65% of every tax dollar collected from us." But the I.R.S budget is about 11.5 billion. I'm having trouble finding total tax revenue collected by the gubmint, but I know enough to know that Mallard's figure is full of &%#$.

Mallard Fillmore comic strip

Steve S.

 

[steve s]

I found the tax figures I was looking for. Total estimated tax receipts for 2005 are 2.052 trillion dollars. Which means the 11.5 billion dollar budget for the I.R.S. makes up just 0.56% of all tax receipts. The guy who writes Mallard Fillmore was only off by a factor of 100. Pretty good for a right-winger.

Steve S.

 

[Charlie Monoxide]

That is one of the lamest cartoons I've ever seen. In my local paper (Orlando Sentinel), they moved that "liberal left-wing" comic strip "Doonesbury" to the editorial pages. In order to offset the commie, left-leaning propaganda of Doonesbury, they run Mallard Fillmore right next to it.

In the last 2 or 3 months I've been reading it (Mallard), it seems to have 2 themes. The first is ad hom attacks on the democrats and the second is stupid spins (and outright fibs) like the OP.

Today's Mallard is SOP. He's been running bumper sticker satire (if you can call it that) of various school stuff that soccer moms put on their mini-vans. It says (sic) "I Have HIE SELLF ESTEAM at KENEDDY MIDDEL SKOOL", with a drawing of a spacey looking blond holding a text-book upside down.

Terribly lame stuff IMHO...

Charlie (Doonesbury is always great, with 0% hate that Mallard has) Monoxide

 

[boooeee]

I think this is the article Mallard was referring to:

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18407/article_detail.asp

From the article:

Politicians, policy experts and academics are amazingly complacent about the blizzard of cross-subsidies that now rages. Several years ago I asked a staff member of the Senate Budget Committee whether she was worried about this problem. Not at all. "It evens out," she said. "Everybody pays for everyone else's goods."



This view ignores the overhead costs of subsidies. When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you incur all sorts of losses. Peter's incentives to work, create, and invest are undermined. Very often, so are Paul's. The result is that economic effort, production, and employment are often lower than they would otherwise be.



And of course there are the costs of operating the tax system: compliance costs, litigation costs, tax planning distortions, and so on. A few years ago I made an attempt to add up all these burdens. The total was a 65 cent loss for every dollar of taxes collected.

So, it looks like Payne was referring to indirect costs, rather than just the budget of the IRS.

Although I'm generally inclined to favor Mr. Payne's viewpoint (taxes bad/subsidies bad), I wouldn't be surprised if his estimate of 65 cents on the dollar is a bit of an overstatement.

And Mallard's use of the phrase "cost of operating" is pretty misleading, given Payne's actual words.

"America: The Book" had pretty funny send ups of both Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore.

 

[tomgv15]

Mallard Fillmore is still being published? The horror. Not only badly written, but horribly drawn. I grew up on Pogo and Doonesbury. Fillmore is the Cathy of political "strips".

 

[Mercutio]

The only cartoonist I can think of to rival Mallard Fillmore in idiocy is Dick Wright of the Columbus Dispatch. Sadly, our local paper seems to have some sort of contract with Wright, so we get the vast majority of his work...including brilliant cartoons demonstrating the superiority of intelligent design to evolution...