Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, commenting on a tax increase in California:
That could happen on the federal level. Already Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That’s not capitalism. That’s Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn.
Setting aside the truth of the charge against Pelosi, Fidel Castro must have been the president of the United States in 1982-86, when the top rate was 50 percent. Or maybe all of the 1970s, when it was 70 percent. Or from 1950-63, when it was 91 percent.
Actually it’s even more ridiculous, because for most people in Cuba, there are no income taxes. Only the minority running their own businesses (e.g., small restaurants) pay income tax.
Diferent social sistem….. He is death wrong!!!
Do you wonder how many persons taxed at the top rate “honestly earn” their income?
And honestly pay what relatively little they owe?
These people earn their money off the backs of the poor; by holding down wages, job combinations, overworking and understaffing. I lived it, and so I don’t fall for the crap that people like O’Reilly spout. All he has earned is really bad karma.
Maybe yet, Bill Stupido O’Reilly should also know that there are NO taxes in Cuba, ZERO, NILCH, NONE!
What a dumbass! No wonder we are, collectively, in the whole we are in. And this is who at least 50% of the US looks up to…
I’m going back to Cuba!
Better yet, Bill Stupido O’Reilly should also know that there are NO taxes in Cuba, ZERO, NILCH, NONE!
What a dumbass! No wonder we are, collectively, in the whole we are in. And this is who at least 50% of the US looks up to…
I’m going back to Cuba!
If most Cubans do not pay income tax, where does the government get the money to pay it’s public workers and pay it’s army and do all the public projects. Sounds fishy.
What othert ax source is there ? A National Sales Tax ?
I heard that Britain has one.
My dad lived off the backs of woman (both my parents voted against the ERA when I was a single mom) and blacks (dad was the campaign manager for an early Barry Goldwater run whose presidential campaign was anti-civil rights platform). So, Mr. O’Reilly,how about finding all that money I (and my kids)lost because I was paid according to gender. / Was Cuba a better place when Our Guy, Batista, ran the country? And how would Cuba have done if our HUGE, self-righteous, better-dead-than-red country had not imposed decades of an imbargo on this little island? / Stop trying to defend your unmerited privilege. // Jean Clelland-Morin
@Makiki Joe
The Cuban government owns most of the country’s means of production, a huge source of revenue. Therefore, it doesn’t really need to tax anybody.
This is misleading journalism. I thought this was FAIR. The 90% in the 50s/60s was before a TON of deductions. So was the 70% in the 70s. Reagen traded the deductions for the lower rate in the 80s. This kind of journalism is tarnish on FAIR and proves FAIR is the equivalent of GAWKER at times.
Randy,
There are lots of deductions now as well, but that is beside the point. O’Reilly and his likes make the flat assertion that a high top income tax rate is un-American, deductions or not. This is simply historically wrong, as FAIR points out.
By the way, if you want to make an argument about the history of deductions, please do – with the appropriate facts and sources, of course – I am interested.
By the way, to whatever extent Reagan “traded deductions for lower rates”, it was a very lucrative trade for the rich. In 1980, the top 0.01% of household paid 39.1% of their income in federal taxes. By the 1988 they were paying 32.2%.
Funny, the Reagan “tax cut” got rid of all interest deductions except mortgage. Think about it. Before this “cut.” your Master Card, Visa, Sears, etc interest payments were deductable. Then they weren’t. For the middle class tax payer, the interest deduction was (and is) almost always the largest. So what was the result of the tax cut for the middle class,