On this Wednesday's The O'Reilly Factor, after guest host Laura Ingraham and Ben Stein did their best to spin the Fox talking point that raising taxes on the upper one percent has not damaged most of the working class in America and decrying anyone who dares to say the the wealthiest among us haven't paid their fair share in taxes, they had the unfortunate circumstance of running into a liberal that I suspect will not be invited back on Fox News any time soon.
Most of the time the only Democrats or liberals Fox allows on the air are feckless ones who don't do a very good job of pushing back at the right wing talking points being spewed while they're on the air. That wasn't the case here. David Callahan of Demos did a very good job shooting down Ingraham and Stein's talking points on taxation and income disparity.
INGRAHAM: And David, an interesting statistic that I hadn't heard before, but Stephen Moore just shared it with me. In 2003 after the Bush tax cuts, the big tax cuts kicked in, for those next four years, the income coming into the federal treasury was the highest in any four year period in our government's history. So tax revenues went up after that tax cut. So the idea that if we only raise taxes on the rich, things will begin to even out and there will be lollipops on the Bushes and rainbows in the sky. I mean it seems to me it doesn't really fly man.
CALLAHAN: Well, actually, Steve has that statistic wrong. As a percentage of GDP taxes were lower under Bush than Clinton. They peeked in 2000 as 20% of GDP. But just going to Ben Stein's point, there is a causal connection between the pain of the middle class and how the rich are making out like bandits, which is that, you know, we're seeing cuts for student aid, cuts for all sorts of social programs, because there's not enough tax revenues and one of the reason there's not enough tax revenues is because taxes on the rich are at the lowest level they've been in sixty years. Look, that is unsustainable.
After which both Stein and Ingraham's heads both exploded, with both of them defending the one percent, and Stein complaining that they pay an unfair amount of the overall percentage of taxes, ignoring the fact that is only true because they also control most of the wealth, so of course they pay a large percent of the taxes, and Ingraham using it as an opportunity to attack the health care law. Callahan countered them fairly well again when given a chance to speak.
CALLAHAN: Well, that Obama program hasn't even gone, isn't even being gone into effect fully...
INGRAHAM: But the taxes haven't fully gone into effect in 2013. We're going to start seeing the taxes.
CALLAHAN: But let's get back to the class warfare issue. I would agree with what Warren Buffet said which is yeah, there's class warfare in this country. It's been waged from the top down. You know, politics is about who gets what and we all know that the way to get what you want in politics is to hire lobbyists and make campaign donations. And the wealthy have the money to do that.
They have taken over our politics and the middle class don't have the means to compete. We see all this money for lobbying, all this money for campaign donations and it shouldn't be a surprise that there are all of these loopholes in the tax code and that a lot of corporations pay no taxes. That a lot of wealthy people pay no taxes. There was a study recently released that found a quarter of all millionaires paid lower taxes than your typical middle class family. That is not right.
The best Ben Stein could manage to come up with to try to counter him there was to claim that most millionaires are Democrats. I've never seen any statistics to prove or disprove what Stein said, but I have a feeling he hasn't either. I have a feeling he just pulled that one out of his posterior.
