This AP article fact-checks Obama on the topic of millionaires paying at a lower tax rate than their secretaries:

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government…

There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that’s less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

But that’s not really news, is it? It’s probably not even news to Obama, although it’s hard to say just how ignorant he might be about economic matters. Plus, of course, that’s only federal taxes; states can add a lot to that.

So what is news? Well, I’ve noticed in the last few months that the AP and other MSM outlets have become somewhat more interested in fact-checking Obama than they used to be. They may not be fact-checking his ass, but they’re fact-checking at least some small portion of his anatomy.

And then there are pundits such as David Brooks, who today has declared himself a sap (actually, he calls himself an “Obama sap”) for believing Obama was serious about deficit reduction:

In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives…

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

Brooks is a bit late to the party, and his mea culpas ring hollow. Anyone who almost immediately becomes entranced with a candidate’s perfectly creased pants leg, or even his ability to quote the intellectual’s intellectual Niebuhr, has got a problem. Here’s Brooks on that pants crease, to refresh your memory:

I remember distinctly an image of””we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

And here’s what I wrote a while back about that [emphasis mine]:

The whole thing reminds me of Daisy’s veneration for Jay Gatsby’s beautiful shirts””although even Daisy wasn’t silly enough to think that his lovely shirts qualified Gatsby to be president, much less a “very good” one. But this is the sort of thing that passes for thought in the MSM these days.

So now—or should I say, at least for now—the scales have dropped from Brooks’s eyes, the antidote to the love potion has been applied, and Brooks, like many others, is wondering what he ever saw in Obama.

I wonder what took so long.

[NOTE: On the substantive issue of raising taxes on the very rich, the Wall Street Journal has much more to say:

If Mr. Obama really wants all of these people to pay even more in taxes, there are only two ways to do so. One is to raise tax rates on capital gains, dividends and other investment income that is taxed at 15% and represents a great deal of income for the wealthy. This is probably Mr. Buffett’s tax secret, though to our knowledge he hasn’t released his returns to the public.

The problem is that this is a tax increase on capital investment, which the U.S. already taxes at prohibitive rates thanks to our high corporate tax rate of 35%. Capital gains and dividends are taxed twice, first as corporate profits and then as payouts to individuals. Their real capital gains tax rate is closer to 45% than 15%, which is why politicians of both parties have long supported a capital-gains rate differential.

The other way to raise taxes on the rare Buffett is with a new Minimum Tax, a la Joe Barr. But as we’ve seen with the AMT, while the politicians may start by chasing “millionaires and billionaires,” over time they always end up taxing the middle class because that’s where the real money is. Mr. Obama could tax every billionaire in America at a 100% rate and still wouldn’t make a dent in the federal deficit. He would, however, succeed in making those taxpayers invest less and search for tax shelters, assuming they didn’t move offshore.

We rehearse all of this because it shows that the real point of Mr. Obama’s Buffett Rule and his latest deficit proposal isn’t tax justice or good tax policy. It is all about re-election politics.

This is not only correct, it’s also not unusual. As no less an observer than former mentor Rev. Wright once said about Obama, “He’s a politician…And he says what he has to say as a politician.”

Well, yes. And Obama’s not the only one; most politicians do the same. And no one should be surprised—least of all David Brooks.]

[ADDENDUM: I’ve decided to republish my previous post on falling out of love with Obama. It continues to seem timely to me. You’ll find it below.]

[ADDENDUM II: Marty Peretz is so far out of love with Obama that it looks like hate. But check out the comments to his piece; TNR readers are still very much in love with Obama, or at least they’re in so much hate with Israel that the enemy of their enemy is their friend.]