An income tax rate of over 100 percent would be hard for anyone to sustain. At a rate a smidge over 100 percent, our deepest pockets might be able to get by if they drew down their wealth or borrowed against it. But keeping up, year in and year out, with an income tax rate of over 1,000 percent, ten times income? That seems, on its face, totally implausible.

Yet the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation would have us believe Warren Buffett did just that for at least five years running, all while enormously growing his own personal wealth.

This conclusion about Buffett’s tax situation emerges inescapably out of the claims the Tax Foundation makes in a research paper published just after last year’s November election. The paper’s title — America’s Super Rich Pay Super Amounts of Taxes, New Treasury Report Finds — could hardly lay out the Tax Foundation’s case more starkly.

But did the U.S. Department of the Treasury report the Tax Foundation paper references actually make such a finding? No, not even close.

The Treasury report does analyze the total tax payments of rich and ultra-rich taxpayers relative to their wealth. The report’s writers, all highly respected economists, took into account every tax that impacts a person’s wealth, directly or indirectly. One example: A corporate shareholder bears no personal responsibility for the payment of a corporation’s income tax. But the Treasury report attributes a proportionate share of that corporate tax to shareholders since corporate taxes reduce the value of shareholders’ holdings and, consequently, their wealth.

The Tax Foundation took this Treasury analysis of total tax payments by wealthy taxpayers and proceeded to blindly compare those payments to these taxpayers’ adjusted gross incomes. That comparison enables the Tax Foundation to insist, among other claims, that the nation’s........

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