At least the ad doesn’t say anything about paying ‘more’ in taxes

Giving credit where it’s due, this ad from President Obama discusses tax rates, rather than claiming that “the guy who made $50,000″ paid more in taxes than Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Now for a reality check: As Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute explained recently:

[U]nless your household was earning more than $189,400 per year, it is unlikely that you are paying a higher federal income-tax rate than Romney. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average middle-income American pays an effective federal income-tax rate of 1.3 percent. Recall that half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all. And, second, about two-thirds of Romney’s income had already been taxed at the corporate level. While a precise estimate is impossible because of variations in corporate-tax payments, if one assumes an average effective corporate rate of roughly 25 percent, Romney’s real federal income-tax rate was closer to 30 percent.

And what about Scott Pelley’s $50,000 earner? The chance that he’s paying an effective tax rate higher than Romney’s is almost zero, if you can believe the rabid right-wingers at CNN/Money.

The effective tax rate is always going to be lower than one’s top income tax rate. And the top rate for roughly four-fifths of Americans is 15% or less, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

In other words, 80% of Americans have an effective rate below 15%.

If you consider income tax liability alone, the average effective federal tax rate for people with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000, for instance, is just 3.2%, according to Tax Policy Center estimates.