Oh dear, someone over at Fox News thinks life is supposed to be fair. For Stuart Varney, "fair" apparently means keeping all the money one earns in a country where the government socializes loss while privatizing profit.
Varney could hardly wait to launch his rant on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning. He was primed for bear, or in this case, Bernie Sanders, who told Martha McCallum the night before that he supported a 52 percent income tax rate on the rich and an estate tax of far more.
"Here is a guy who is -- he's a 1 percenter. He's a millionaire. And he's a socialist," Varney seethed. "I got a problem with that."
"He is trying to make sure that we, the rest of us on our way up, don't accumulate the kind of pile that he has already got at 77," he went on, as if he isn't a millionaire in his own right.
Warming up, he howled his discontent for all to see. "It is outrageous. He wants to raise the estate tax dramatically to take it off you. Now look, where is the fairness in this? Where is the fairness in taking more, wait, wait, wait. Bernie Sanders constantly goes back to the idea he has a fair plan. He is for fairness in our society. Where is the fairness in taking more than half of anyone's income? Where is it?" he wailed.
I guess this is where I have to remind Stuart Varney and others of a couple of things. First, there's no fairness in Walmart workers having to go on food stamps to supplement their full time paychecks either. There's no fairness in a tax bill that gives corporations and billionaires a pass while middle class workers are hit with a tax bill that's twice what they paid last year. And for those folks fortunate enough to make enough money to find themselves in Bernie's top bracket, they're still keeping 48 percent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions.
Varney couldn't stop crying, though. After ranting about income tax, he moved on to Sanders' proposed estate tax, whining, "Where is the fairness in confiscating our money when we've saved all our lives for that money to pass on to our children and our grandchildren? Where is the fairness in confiscating that?"
I don't know about you, but most folks I know are scraping along and either can't save any money for an emergency, or have very little saved. They have no retirement savings, and certainly aren't thinking about what they're passing down to their children and grandchildren. We're more concerned that there won't be a planet for them than with any inheritance they get from us. So why should we give some special deference to the Kochs of the world, again?
For an extra giggle, watch Brian Kilmeade stretch out the word "SOCIALISM" as if it is a swear word that will cause viewers to recoil. It seems to me they're hip to the fact that Medicare is a socialist program already and support some more of that!
As for Varney, I'm sure we'll hear him whine more and more about how MEAN it is for Democrats to want wealthy folks to pay their fair share.
(Transcript via Media Matters)
