Don't Mess With Taxes

Fact checkers got a head start last night when Donald J. Trump's speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination was leaked to the media.

Click image to see NBC News' fact check highlights of Donald J. Trump's Republican presidential nominee acceptance speech.

Of course, folks still had to watch the full 76 minutes that Trump talked in case he decided to deviate from the teleprompter.

So few tax remarks: As a tax geek, I was disappointed that Trump had so few words about taxes.

The word "tax" or "taxes" only showed up eight times, and not until well into (about the 3,200 word mark of the 4,350+ document) the longest presidential nominee acceptance speech in the modern political times.

"Tax" is reddish in the middle-right of this word rectangle of Trump's speech created by Jason Davies word cloud generator.

What Trump got wrong: I also was disappointed to see and hear a major misspeak by The Donald -- I know, shocking! -- when it comes to taxes.

He said, "America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world."

Not true, Mr. Trump.

Trump has made this claim before and every time, tax folk point out that he's wrong. But he just doesn't seem to hear. Again, I know, shocking!

Where U.S. stands with its taxes: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) latest annual Revenue Statistics report found that the tax burden in the United States increased by 0.6 percentage points from 25.4 percent to 26.0 percent in 2014.

And, according to OECD data, the tax burden in the United States since 2000 has decreased from 28.2 percent to 26.0 percent.

During that same 14-year period analyzed by OECD, the average tax burden for the member countries increased slightly from 34.2 percent to 34.4 percent.

So exactly where does the United States stand tax-wise when compared with the world's other developed countries?

We ranked 31st out of 34 OECD countries in terms of the tax to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio in 2013, the latest year for which tax revenue data is available for all OECD countries.

That year, the United States had a tax to GDP ratio of 25.4 percent compared with the OECD average of 34.2 percent.

More facts checked: If you're interested in other nontax factual errors found in Trump's speech that closed out the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last night, check out reports from New York Times, NBC News, Washington Post and National Public Radio.

And yes, I'll do the same with Hillary Clinton's speech next week from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.