Anderson Cooper, the CNN moderator, has no excuse: his claim that 47% of American pay no taxes was inexcusable. Just terrible. The correct stat is that 47% of US households don’t pay federal income taxes, which is very different. It’s bad when politicians get basic factual stuff wrong; it’s terrible when CNN does. To me at least, the debate had a clear loser, and it was Anderson Cooper and CNN for that question.

In a debate like last night's you expect the candidates to spout a lot of conservative conventional wisdom masquerading as truth. What you don't expect is those lies coming out of the moderator's mouth

Let's just do this one more time. That 47 percent figure applies only to federal income taxes. The ones not paying are the poor, the elderly who have, you know, very little income, and those who qualify for child tax credits. These people still pay state taxes. They still pay payroll taxes. They pay federal excise taxes, they pay local taxes. And, in fact, "low- and moderate-income people pay a much larger share of their incomes in federal payroll taxes than high-income people do."

[T]axpayers in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale paid an average of 8.8 percent of their incomes in payroll taxes in 2007, compared to just 1.6 percent for taxpayers in the top 1 percent of the income distribution.[...] Low-income families also pay substantial state and local taxes. Most state and local taxes are regressive, meaning that low-income families pay a larger share of their incomes in these taxes than wealthier households do. The bottom fifth of taxpayers paid 12.3 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2010, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) model. That was well above the 7.9 percent average rate that the top 1 percent of households paid.

So, CNN and Cooper, how about a correction on that one?