CHARLES PAYNE (FOX HOST): And that's to suggest that if we tax the heck out of billionaires, if we take all their money, we confiscate it, we just snatch it, that it will make life better for every other American, and that's just a false narrative there. Listen, we had a 90 percent tax rate, a 91 percent tax rate, in 1950s. The upper 1 percent, the wealthy at that time, their real tax rate, their effective tax rate -- not the one that was stated, not the nominal one -- was 16 percent. People find a way to hide money, to shift money around, or to find other ways not to pay a high income tax. In fact, a lot of those billionaires don't even have high salaries.
BILL HEMMER (CO-HOST): Schultz is saying he should be paying more taxes.
PAYNE: Right.
HEMMER: That's a quote from him: “I should be paying more taxes.” All right, then you would say, cut a check.
PAYNE: Well of course I would say to Schultz, Bill Gates -- Bill Gates also saying he would like to see, he would like to pay more, but they think that income tax is not a --
HEMMER: But my point, they can pay more --
PAYNE: Of course they can, give it away, give it all. Instead they want -- and that's the problem is that they actually create, sort of -- someone climbs a mountain and then they pull up the ladder, because now no one else can duplicate what Bill Gates has done or Howard Schultz has done if they put in these onerous taxes that stop someone who just finally made a million dollars. Not a billion, but a million. You want to crush that person. Maybe the first person in their family to make that kind of money, maybe they can put their little brothers into college, maybe they can buy a house. No, you want to snatch it from them, the first generation to make a million, even though you're a billionaire. That's the fallacy with these guys, with these progressive billionaires who are okay with higher taxes.
