NorQuislings: Avg family pays more in taxes than for food, shelter, etc.

Yesterday's lame duck strip "Mallard Fillmore" parroted a talking point of Americans for Tax Reform (Grover Norquist's feeding trough): allegedly, "The average American now spends more in taxes than on food, clothing, and shelter combined." (this particular quote is from Norquist while he was commenting on a 2001 proposed North Dakota telecom tax, but the same thing is said repeatedly by ATR spokespeople.)

Naturally, for this argument they include the sum of Federal, state, and local taxes, something they forget to do whenever the "poor don't pay taxes" meme comes up.

Now, this "more than on food, shelter, and clothing" smells like a steaming pile of elephant dung to me, especially with the "average family"/"typical American" caveat.

My question is: does anyone know more about this? About what numbers they use to damn lie with statistics?

Especially when your standard for "average" is $500,000 and up.

Now this includes EVERYTHING: income, ss, property, sales, county, work, city, car, boat, cigarette, gas, etc.

Now there are other things to buy besides food, shelter and clothing: dishes, cars, CDs, TV. So if governments take 50% and people are buying things other than food, shelter and clothing, they are paying more in taxes than those three.

Ballast Filledmore is completely full of sh*t, but according to what I've heard, we pay enough in taxes to have some type of single-payer healthcare; we're just not getting it.

not just the DoD budget, and the endless $80B+ "supplemental" appropriations, but a large part of the interest on the national debt, which was run up to fight previous wars.

"Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over"...

So, if they were really inteested in cutting taxes, they'd actually have to -- gasp! -- question the PNAC war machine. Ain't gonna happen.

Edit: can't prove "most", so "much", plus: interest