Canadian drinking two times more alcohol than a decade ago

I just made that up.

But it seems possible and it may be floating around on twitter already.

And that's an issue -- the internet, and twitter especially, is a great generator of plausible nonsense.

Much is created intentionally for political spin, both left and right.

An example -- a tweet that says in 1950 Canadians paid 2% of their income in federal tax while today they pay 25%.

That didn't make sense to me and I dug around the web and found what I think is the story's root -- blogposts saying, on average, an American (not Canadian) family of four paid the US Federal government 2% of the family income in 1950 and now pays 25%.

Now, that also seemed implausible as 1950 was during Korea so I did some more research and found, as best I could, that in America, average Federal , state and local taxes -- including income,property, sales and other taxes -- consumed 9.2 percent of all personal income in 2009. That rate is far below the historic average of 12 percent. Spending, in America, may be out of control but taxes as the same as they were, if not lower, than 60 years ago.

Why would anyone make up a story that taxes have increased twelve-fold since 1950 when in fact they have been pretty stable?

Cui bono. Who benefits from a mistaken belief that taxes are at historically outrageous levels? The question answers itself.