Bill O'Reilly must have been bored with the Ted Cruz phony filibuster because he opened his show with a rant about how Obama has turned America into a socialist, Marxist country--or something. He used his TPM and turned to his favorite topics of taxes and protecting the wealthy rich dudes like himself from being taxed.
O'REILLY: President Obama and his acolytes do not want Americans to accumulate wealth. They want to take private wealth away from those who have it and give it to those who don't have it. And they have succeeded in doing that with an assist from the Bush administration, which ran up colossal debt after 9/11. Taxes in America have reached critical mass.
You'll notice now that conservatives who supported everything George Bush did (during his presidency including running up the national debt from a surplus) are now allowed to talk about his government spending as if he was a lefty since he's been out of office for five years. (Bill O'Reilly was a major Bush apologist in the media.)
BillO bullies his way through Dr. Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor at Iona College, for most of the segment even though she raises good points to defend her position.
Dr. Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor at Iona College, highlighted historic levels of income inequality and government efforts to mitigate the problem, O'Reilly yelled over her:
"Your basic thesis of income inequality is socialism. Don't you get that? The government cannot impose income equality on a private marketplace. It can't."
He yammered on and on about how much less income the folks have --without bringing in the financial collapse into play or anything relevant to the table. It must be nice to create your own reality to the table to support your own kind of idiocy. He's so freaking stupid. He's trying to make the case that we want to redistribute all his rich friends monies' because we're all moochers, but that's not what the topic of income inequality is all about.
When we had high participation in unions during the fifties and sixties, income inequality was at very low levels, but you better not tell O'Reilly about it. And Bill, the California people voted for higher taxes which has resulted in taking the state from near bankruptcy to having a nice budget surplus --a remarkable turnaround.
Media Matters grabs some research to debunk this economic clown.
O'Reilly misfired on several of his arguments. For starters, his focus on total raw tax revenue is deceptive. Total tax revenue rises as the size of the economy and the working population grows -- revenues are comparable only as they relate to the size of the economy, which corrects for this growth. Under Obama, tax revenues as a share of the economy are historically low. During Obama's first term, the ratio of revenue to GDP averaged 15.4 percent, the lowest levels since 1950, according to data from the Tax Policy Center.
For context, since 1950, federal revenue has averaged approximately 18 percent of GDP. These numbers are unsurprising because federal tax rates have declined to "near historic lows" for middle-income Americans, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities determined...
--O'Reilly's claim that Obama has "succeeded" in redistributing wealth is laughable given the recent economic milestone the U.S. reached -- in 2012, the nation's income inequality gap reached its greatest extent since before the Great Depression. According to the Associated Press, America's richest one percent saw their incomes rise by 20 percent last year, while the other 99 percent of the country saw their incomes rise only one percent. University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez recently released research showing that the top one percent has captured 95 percent of the income gains made during the first three years of economic recovery following the recession. Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich addressed a similar argument to O'Reilly's for cutting taxes and found it lacking, debunking his cries of "socialism" in the process.
As Reich explained, America's historic income inequality is hurting our economy, and tax cuts are not the solution
