PolitiFact

federal agency, it is a flawed comparison, and it fails to capture accompanying growth in income as well as other statistics that show the tax burden increased by a more modest amount.

Smith’s office confirmed that the statistic comes from the most recent annual installment of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics released in late August.

Average taxes paid, according to the survey, were $7,432 in 2013, but they rose to $10,489 in 2016. That’s a 41 percent increase, as Smith wrote.

One important bit of context that’s missing: This figure ignores that average pretax income increased by 17 percent over the same threeyear period.

Taxes as a percentage of income rose 20 percent. That’s about half the 41 percent increase Smith cited.

In addition, the statistic Smith cited doesn’t communicate the reality that richer taxpayers saw a much bigger increase than taxpayers of more typical means.

When broken down into quintiles — the top one-fifth of earners, the second onefifth and so on — the increase from 2013 to 2016 was 29.1 percent for those in the middle quintile, compared with 44.6 percent for the highest income quintile.

That said, the survey shows a substantial increase in taxes paid overall — an increase well beyond the growth of income.

There’s an important caveat, however: The bureau told us about a stumbling block in comparing 2013 and 2016 numbers.

Basically, the bureau made a methodological change that results in an exaggerated increase in taxes paid during that time.

“There was definitely an increase, but the magnitude needs to be interpreted carefully due to differences in how the (survey) measures taxes and income,” Steven Henderson, chief of the bureau’s division of consumer expenditure surveys, told PolitiFact.

The bureau changed its methodology in 2013, but the change was undertaken in a way that makes the 2013 figures for taxes paid lower than they were in subsequent years, Henderson said. The 2013 tax data are “lower and less reliable for comparison to later years,” he said.

Is there an alternative way to assess how much taxes rose from 2013 to 2016? As it happens, there are at least two.

One source is the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department.

According to this data, taxes rose 17 percent over the same three-year period, well below the 41 percent in Smith’s letter. And over that same period, income rose 13 percent. This means that taxes did rise faster than income, but only modestly.

A second data source is the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. We didn’t see income data in its tables, but we did find the total amount of tax revenue generated for 2013 to 2016.

And the percentage increase in tax revenue was essentially identical to what the Bureau of Economic Analysis found — 17 percent — and less than what Smith had written.

Some of the contradictions in the numbers are explained by the various collection methods.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey is based on a sampling of Americans — 28,000 interviews per year, along with approximately 7,000 more detailed interactions through voluntary diaries. The Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, measure actual, comprehensive data reported by the federal Treasury.

The big takeaway? There was an increase in taxes paid in the period Smith identified. But it wasn’t as big as 41 percent.

Our ruling

Smith wrote, “The average tax bill for Americans in 2016 was a 41 percent increase from 2013.”

Smith has accurately cited the results of the federal Consumer Expenditure Survey, even though he’s glossed over the simultaneous increases in income and the fact that increases for richer taxpayers drove that jump.

However, the survey’s leadership acknowledged to PolitiFact that, for technical reasons, the 2013 to 2016 comparison is undercut by methodological differences. An alternative measurement using different federal data showed that, after adjusting for income increases over the same period, taxes rose 3 percent.

That’s an increase, but a more modest one. So we rate the statement Half True.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics made a methodological change that results in an exaggerated increase in taxes paid in 2013 and 2016.