Reporter confronts Donald Trump over repeated false claims US is the ‘highest taxed country’

The US might not be the highest taxed nation in the world but that has never stopped Donald Trump from claiming it is.

The president, who has made the debunked assertion over a dozen times, has now defended the false claim after being confronted by a reporter about why he keeps repeatedly touting it.

“You have repeatedly said that we are the highest tax nation in the world when that’s been seen as objectively false, with the credibility you need to pass tax reform,” Mike Sacks, national political correspondent for EW Scripps, asked President Trump.

Mr Trump responded by interrupting and claiming he was merely using it as shorthand and it might be more accurate to say the US is the most taxed nation among developed countries.

He said: “Some people say it differently, and they will say we are the highest developed nation taxed in the world.”

“A lot of people know exactly what I am talking about, and in many cases they think I am right when I say the highest. As far as I am concerned, we are really essentially the highest. But if you’d like to add the ‘developed nation,’ you can say that, too. But a lot of people agree that the way I am saying is exactly correct.”

The billionaire property developer's attempt to explain himself was also founded on a wholly false claim as when you survey taxing in developed economies almost every other country taxes a higher share of its economy.

If you look at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an institution which comprises of 35 member countries and is the most accepted proxy for developed nations, the US is in no way the highest taxed country.

What’s more, the Pew Research Center, using 2014 data, examined average taxes and social insurance contributions as a percentage of gross income for different family types and the US virtually always ranked near the bottom.

The US president first started claiming America was the most highly taxed country in the world during the 2016 presidential race despite it having no factual basis.

According to the Washington Post’s on-going database of the false and misleading claims President Trump has made during his first year in office, the world leader made this particular claim 14 times between 20 January and 8 October but has added to the record since then.

President Trump is firmly in favour of lower levels of taxation and recently outlined plans to overhaul America’s tax code by proposing sweeping tax cuts in what he terms a “one-in-a-generation” opportunity.

He pitched his tax plan which sets out the most significant tax changes in decades to a friendly audience on Tuesday night, telling a conservative audience broad tax cuts would bring prosperity.

Speaking at an event put on by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, he hailed his tax plan which he hopes to accomplish by December as an "opportunity to revitalise our economy” by revolutionizing America’s “outdated, complex and extremely burdensome tax code”.

He said: “Lower taxes mean bigger paychecks, more jobs, and stronger growth".

President Trump’s tax reform plan, which he is hoping will recover his embattled legislative agenda, seeks to axe the corporate rate from 35 per cent to 20 per cent and do away with the alternative minimum tax. This is a safety net in place to stop tax avoidance which resulted in the president paying $31 million in additional taxes in 2005.

The estate tax, which affects only a few thousand ultra-rich families each year, will also be eliminated under his proposal. The change would predominantly benefit the upper echelons of earners including President Trump himself.

According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the plan would slim federal revenue by about $2.4 trillion over a decade. While the average tax bill would decline across all income groups, the report found about half of the total benefit would go to the wealthiest one per cent of Americans.