Talking Points: What Do You Owe Your Country?
In tonight’s Talking Points Memo, Bill O’Reilly asked the question, what do Americans owe the country? That brewing debate was prompted after President Obama gave a speech in which he stated, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
The O’Reilly Factor host assessed, “Apparently the president believes that the federal government should take more in taxes from wealthy Americans and business owners because the feds make individual success possible.”
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O’Reilly had his own take on the issue, saying, “No man is an island. Everybody needs help to develop their potential, that’s true. However, individual achievement is just that. Barack Obama did not help me develop The Factor. No federal agency helped me go to college. I paid my own way.”
He acknowledged that, “Yes, the Founding Fathers gave me freedom of speech to bloviate here and I owe a debt of gratitude to my country for that. I am grateful and I am willing to pay 40 percent of my wages to Caesar, to the powers that be. But President Obama wants far more than that and I believe that punishes achievement.”
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That’s not enough for the president, says O’Reilly. “He wants me and other high income folks to finance a massive redistribution of wealth in this country. Right now the feds can’t do that because the country owes $16 trillion dollars, so the president has to raise taxes on those who [are wealthy] to finance his social justice programs.”
The Congressional Budget Office reports that the top five percent of wage-earners in the United States pay 64 percent of federal income taxes, which means that the other 95 percent are paying 36 percent of all federal income tax. Therefore, said O’Reilly, “there’s no question that affluent Americans are paying their fair share.”
He contended, “Most wealthy Americans are not evading their responsibility but sadly, that’s not what the president is saying. He wants to redistribute income on the backs of the achievers.”
