Bill O'Reilly used his Talking Points Memo to whine about how terribly rich people are being treated in America.
From Blue Nation Review: Bill O'Reilly Wants You to Feel Bad for Rich People Like Bill O'Reilly:
Bill O’Reilly doesn’t know what income inequality means.
He thinks rich people (like Bill O’Reilly) are oppressed by high taxes, crying themselves to sleep every night on their gold brocade pillows. He thinks poor people skip happily through the streets singing songs of joy celebrating their luck that they don’t have to pay taxes and therefore have more money than rich people.
He wants you to feel sorry for the sad miserable lot of America’s wealthy. This is what Bill O’Reilly actually believes.
Transcript via O'Reilly's site: Income Inequality in America:
It is becoming clear that Hillary Clinton will try to convince American voters that she can solve a very vexing problem.
HILLARY CLINTON: “As you look across the country, the deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top. And there’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker.”
But now come accusations that Hillary Clinton herself is making far more money than most CEOs.
We'll get to that in a moment.
But it is the notion that somehow our capitalistic system has gone corrupt and the feds must punish those making money that will be in the forefront of the 2016 campaign.
This year -- 2015 -- the feds will gather more tax money than ever before, about $3 trillion.
That's because since taking office President Obama has proposed 442 tax increases, not counting 20 others associated with Obamacare.
As you may know, Americans earning more than $400,000 must pay close to 40% of their income to the federal government.
The Social Security tax has increased from 4.2 to 6.2%; all workers pay that.
And itemized deductions, which you can use to bring down your tax bill, are now being phased out for high-wage earners and profitable businesses.
In fact, the USA has the highest tax rate on business in the world.
And if you invest in business, the short-term capital gain is now close to 40%.
Long-term cap-gains up from 15 to 20%.
There's also an additional 3.8% tax on investment income to pay for Obamacare.
So you can see that taxes are through the roof on affluent Americans and business profits.
But for the rest of Americans, things are not so bad.
The bottom 60% of wage-earners pay just 2.7% of federal income taxes.
The bottom 40% actually get money from the feds; they receive payments called earned-income tax credits.
According to financial analyst Alexander Green, who works for the Oxford Club, the tax burden on business and investors drives down job creation and economic expansion.
I believe that I've cut back investing because of the heavy capital gains hit.
And I know small business people who will not hire because the feds are all over them with additional taxes and regulations.
Yes, there is a big gap between the rich and working-class Americans.
But how much more can the government take from the affluent without crashing the entire free-market economy?
That's the real question of campaign 2016.
And one more thing: If Hillary Clinton is going to continue the punishing taxation that Barack Obama has imposed, we all need to know that.
Because the result is likely to be the same stagnant take-home pay.
Again, the only way that salaries will go up in America is for private industry to expand, creating more jobs and more competition for workers.
And that's the memo.
Of course O'Reilly failed to mention all of those loopholes that businesses use to get their effective tax rate down, the cap on Social Security taxes (and he can thank their hero St. Ronnie for that increase he was complaining about), or that fact that most working people pay a whole lot more taxes than just federal income taxes, but it's Bill-O. Telling the truth would ruin his schtick.
