A Fox Business correspondent claimed that it was better to forgo nearly $3 million in additional prize money than to pay the roughly $400,000 in taxes due on it, representing a continuation of the baseless Fox News narrative that the rich have unduly high tax burdens.

Professional golfer Phil Mickelson placed second at June's U.S. Open golf tournament. Fox Business correspondent Lauren Simonetti argued on June 19's edition of Fox & Friends First that it may have been better for Mickelson to have lost the tournament and place second, for he would avoid paying nearly $400,000 in additional taxes.

She explained that had Mickelson won the tournament -- and won the $1.44 million first prize -- he would have had to pay an additional $76,000 more in taxes than he paid by placing second and receiving $700,000. Mickelson would have also had to pay an additional $300,000 in taxes on $2.5 million in bonuses paid to him by his sponsors, had he won. She concluded it's better to avoid paying roughly $400,000 in taxes than to win nearly $3 million in after-tax income. Simonetti said this made Mickelson "$400,000 richer."

This conclusion may stem from Fox's zealotry against additional taxes for the rich: the rich, because of their supposed onerous tax burden, need lower taxes in order to continue amassing wealth, or else they may stop working.

The idea that the wealthiest Americans have a disproportionately high tax burden is a fabrication Fox has pushed for years.  However, a February 15 New York Times article reported that incomes for top earners rose more than 11 percent during the recovery from the most recent recession, while the rest saw their incomes decline slightly. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted in an April 14 New York Times Opinionator blog post, “as the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the effective tax rates they pay have markedly decreased.” The Center for Tax Justice (CTJ) found that the effective tax rate -- a rate including all federal, state and local taxes paid -- for the wealthiest Americans is not much higher than the effective tax rate for middle class Americans:

In the same report the CTJ found that the precentage of all taxes paid by the wealthy is near the amount of all national income captured by the wealthy.

From this fabrication, Fox has argued that the supposedly high tax burden will make the rich not work or might seek lower taxes in different states. In September 2011, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly equated earnings to achievement and claimed that “if you tax achievement, some of the achievers are going to pack it in.” And in September 2010, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade argued that high levels of taxation, to the wealthy, “robs you of your ambition and your push and your drive.”

However, the rich have not been doing this. As Reuters reported, millionaires in high tax states, such as Mickelson's home state of California, have not left the state for low-tax alternatives. Mickelson himself suggested in January he may quit golf due to California's income taxes, walking back the statement a day later. If the 2013 U.S. Open results are any indication, Mickelson is still playing golf, presumably because after taxes he still earns millions and because he doesn't take financial advice from Fox.