Unpublished mediocracy definition #3

Observer leader:

Some of the richest businessmen in Britain pay less tax than the people who clean their offices.

Via Tim Worstall, who points out the mistake. Plain idiocy or motivated propaganda? I suspect the latter.

The ideology is already well established in most people's minds that:

it is not enough if someone earning more merely pays more tax;

it is in fact "unfair" if someone earning £40K pays less than double the tax of someone earning £20K;

indeed (many now seem to assume) it is "unfair" unless he or she is paying more than double the tax.

So why not just skip the underlying logic, and make the linguistic transition, so that "pay more tax" is shorthand for "pay a higher rate of tax"? Makes it so much easier for all concerned to remember the ideologically correct way to think about the issue ...