“Who’s accountable for this lie?”

Ventura County Star:

In a television ad now airing, paid for by an independent expenditure group called the California Senior Advocates League PAC and attacking Sen. Fran Pavley, an announcer asserts, “While Pavley voted to raise our taxes, she pays none on her six-figure salary.”

While that bald-faced assertion is being made, a screen shot shows a photo of Pavley alongside a headline that reads “$261,000 tax free salary.”

The assertion is preposterous. Legislators are paid an annual salary of $90,526, and they pay taxes just like everyone else — federal income taxes, Social Security taxes, state income taxes and the rest. In fact, the Pavley family’s tax attorney attests in an email shared with me today that Pavley and her husband, Andy, paid $16,797 in federal income taxes in 2011, for an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent. In addition, they paid state income taxes of $5,925.

So where does this “tax free salary” assertion come from?

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