Megyn Kelly occasionally goes off the reservation. She is a very smart person, unlike many of the Fox airheads. She is one of those people they keep around to say “see, we are fair and balanced!”
I am not sure what O’Reilly is arguing. He admits that the income inequality exists and is getting worse, but that it is a natural market thing? I agree that a gap itself is typical of a market and will always be to some degree, but the scope is not a trait, nor does it have to do with laziness. Many people at the top of the pyramid really make money off of money and do not add to the economy that much in a traditional sense. Government policy can decrease the gap, but it is true that they cannot totally do away with it without really pissing people off.
Really, it would be better for everyone if it was handled by companies. Hire more people and pay them better, that would shrink the gap.
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I must have missed reading about Bilbo winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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O’Reilly personifies fatuity.
He reminds me of the blowhard one finds in any blue collar bar.
His admirers think he’s “smart” as he yells things at the TV.
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But whenever it happens, dim bulbs like Professor Bilbo take her out to the woodshed. You know, there are all sorts of reasons to find the likes of Hannity and Van Sustern and the other rabid dogs at Fox Noise generally repulsive. But for me, nothing quite measures up to the combination of ignorance, pomposity, condescension, and abject lying so excruciatingly demonstrated by Bilboreilly on a daily basis. Just. Plain. Awful.
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What they are really afraid of is that the richest people and companies get forced to pay a living wage. Instead, we taxpayers are forced, to use their terminology, “at the point of a government gun, (the IRS),” to pay to feed the people who work at Wal-Mart. Meanwhile the richest family in America gets richer. What they are afraid of is that we will rise up and say “NO, support your own damned workers.” This is why they really hate Obamacare…it will force the Papa Johns and the Home Depot billionaires to cover more the real cost of their labor, rather than foist it off on the taxpayers.
What makes Europe fundamentally different is that when we, the USA, were rebuilding their economies, we forced the formerly Nazi corporations to respect unions and to have union representation on the board of directors. So when VW and BMW started discussing moving jobs to low wage countries, there was someone in the board room who’s main interest was not just profit, but the welfare of the workers. As a result, Germany has high wages and a strong economy, because the workers can afford to buy the cars they make. Its just common sense.
American companies have no loyalty to anyone but the stock holders. If they could make money and pay a penny an hour wages, they would be fine with that, even if it destroys the economy of the people who buy their products. Hell, even Henry Ford understood that was stupid, and he was a Hitler loving fascist. Maybe this explains the right wing love affair with Putin.
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She’s an adult and he’s a patronizing chauvinist shit.
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Dunno how “smart” Kelly is. Having a PhD does not make one
“smart”. True, most PhD programs require a high IQ and lots of work and writing, but judgement is not correlated with IQ or formal education, counter-intuitive as that may sound.
Now it’s possible that someone like Kelly knows better, but plays a role as a Fox “conservative” for the bucks.
Of course these little interchanges between daddy O’Reilly and Kelly playing the naif, are all orchestrated to create an appearance of intellectual explication.
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Don’t buy junk. These con men don’t want the youth, women, ignorant, seniors or religious nuts to buy anything but the policies they sell.
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THE MALIGNANCY OF O'REILLY
Imagine having a “fact-based” job and being paid millions to disseminate fiction. Stir in the additional incentive to release all of your pent-up vitriol toward your fellow man. Top it off with the (a) kid-gloves treament from those in society (like the Fourth Estate) who should be alternately amused and appalled by this and (b) lemming-like consumers.
I must confess, that, in the 1980s, I did not see this social landscape coming in the U.S., for the 21st Century.
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Sexist, racist, seniors, conservative church ladies and stuck in the mud white males, viewers. In other words the base.
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Billo really isn’t very bright. Megyn, on the other hand, is quite bright but has to keep it hidden as a condition of employment.
While income inequality does always exist, it is the worst in the US that it has been since the 1920s. It has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with letting money go out of the economy and into the pockets of the very rich.
It’s a fairly simple fact of economics. Low taxes on the very wealthy leads to high wealth inequality because the very rich get to keep more of their money. High wealth inequality leads to negative economic growth because the very wealthy don’t put their additional money back into the economy; they ship it to the Cayman Islands or Switzerland and use it for keeping score. An expanding economy requires demand. Demand is created when people have money they want or need to spend. Making the rich richer does not grow the economy. This was proved in 1929 and again in 2008. Even the Pope has figured this out.
Here are two charts that illustrate this point perfectly. The first shows the percentage of income of the top 1% in the USA. Note that it peaked in 1928 at 23.9% which quickly led to the great depression. It then peaked again in 2007 at 23.5% leading to the great recession. The second chart shows the top marginal tax rates in the US over time. Note that the lowest historical rates were between 1925 and 1931, leading to the spike in income inequality that brought on the great depression and again for a lengthy period from 2002 to 2012 leading to the spike in income inequality that led to the great recession. Also note that the two charts are more or less inverse images of one another.
[Edit: Since TPM apparently downloads linked images and then replaces the original URL with a broken link to the downloaded image, here are the original image URLs
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/2008_Top1percentUSA.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Historical_Mariginal_Tax_Rate_for_Highest_and_Lowest_Income_Earners.jpg
They are useful to have in case anyone ever asks you what drives income inequality and what effect it has on the economy. They are also useful if someone like O’Reilly tries to tell you that government policies don’t effect income inequality or that income inequality doesn’t have an adverse effect on the economy. Basically, if the government doesn’t intervene to correct income inequality, the economy will.]
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kelly makes 6 mil a year and oreally makes 17 mil a year…both are anchors and have there own shows…
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Funny how these Republicans have to be personally affected by a problem to acknowledge it’s existence. Or maybe they don’t give a crap about anyone but themselves.
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Oh yes, on FOX you can. They have constructed a complete fantasy world, reinforced every day by the Ailes propaganda. Climate change is a hoax, Obamacare will destroy the planet, Benghazi is the worst scandal in the history of mankind. Really Megyn, get on the bandwagon here.
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Absolutely. O’Reilly is right that some degree of inequality will always exist in a capitalist system. But he is wrong to imply that government policies have nothing to do with the widening of the inequality gap. That’s what so many programs of the Progressive Era were all about – to counter the tendency of a capitalist economy to pile up wealth among the few. Hence, the estate tax, the corporate income tax, progressive tax systems, the breaking up of monopolies, etc.
Too great a concentration of wealth among the lucky few is not healthy for a society in the long term.
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The absolute irony in this, and I am NO fan of Megyn Kelly whatsoever…is that she’s right.
It does exist and despite her wealth of privilege that allowed her to come from lesser circumstances to go to law school and then host a program, she’s still sitting there across from a male colleague who would be her broadcast equal (both with primetime hour long programs) making less money than he does with better qualifications.
But remember that O’Reilly also doesn’t think racism exists or white privilege. So she’s debating a fruitless point with a pinhead.
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Sure, republicans CAN ignore inequality and pretend that is doesn’t exist. That is their BEST strategy - it worked for them for climate change, racism and gay marriage. Why wouldn’t it work for income inequality?
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I would pay good money for the privilege of punching billo in the nose, really, really hard.
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in bill oreally’s and right wing world actual definition:I got mine.now all you poors and middle classes … go screw yourselves
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