Bill O'Reilly on the Daily Show

He and Jon Stewart have an enjoyably affable rapport, there is no denying it. But I found O'Reilly to be less worth watching this time than in his past appearances. He wasn't really debating Jon, just spouting talking points in a mechanistic fashion (Solyndra! $16 muffins! Job creators!). Meh. But he did say one thing I found interesting, namely that he wouldn't mind paying a 40% tax rate if the federal government would just stop wasting so much money. That's where Solyndra and the muffins came up, and of course, he's wrong/lying about both of those on the merits. But I think the argument is interesting in and of itself, because it suggests that it's not actually about economic incentives at all.


The standard way conservatives like to attack progressive taxation is by arguing that high marginal tax rates on rich people will reduce their economic incentive to do productive work, and that this is problematic. There's scant evidence for this, and in any event it might still be preferable to taking that money from the working class who will suffer more from it. But that's not the argument O'Reilly is making. He's saying, I'd be fine with paying a higher tax rate, if I liked what the government was doing with my dollars better. So it's not about his monetary incentive to work, is it? He's basically trying to strike to coerce the federal government into changing its policies. What if anti-war liberals circa 2005 had said, "we oppose the Iraq war, we're rich enough that we can live just fine on our savings, so we're going to stop making money and therefore paying taxes until this war stops"? How would, uh, Bill O'Reilly have reacted? He'd've been apoplectic.

More to the point, this is also a deeply undemocratic idea. (Shocker, right?) He's essentially trying to get influence over the federal government's policies not by voting but by paying taxes. I think some conservatives might be willing to agree with the proposition that people should have influence on the government in proportion to the amount of taxes they pay, as they do like to reduce everything to money, but this is worse than that. This is giving people influence on the government proportional to the amount of taxes they could manage to intentionally not pay by going without income. So now we aren't giving middle-class folks, or even kinda-rich folks, any votes at all, because they can't really afford to do this kind of income strike.

Bill O'Reilly gets one chance to tell the federal government what policies to adopt, every second November, when he can vote in a federal election. He gets to vote on an equal footing with every other U.S. citizen over the age of 18 (who isn't a felon). He can try to influence the government, mainly by trying to influence other voters, something he's uncommonly good at. He can give his large amounts of money to advocacy groups supporting his causes (oh, wait, he's part of one...). If he doesn't like the way the federal government spends its money, there are a lot of options available to him. But saying, "I'm rich, I think the government is wasteful, so screw it, I'm gonna stop working to avoid paying taxes" is not okay. That's going beyond standard-issue greed and beyond the usual money-politics confluence, to just stating that government must be of the people, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.