Jon Stewart was on fire last night, mocking the GOP's "job creators" line and Bill O'Reilly's threat of quitting his show if he's taxed more, finishing off the masterful piece with his own PSA.
The Republicans must be able to counter this by putting a human face on the burden this will place on our nation's most vulnerable wealthy. Cue Louisiana Republican Congressman and small business owner of 33 Subway sandwich shops, John Fleming.
9/19/2011:
CHRIS JANSING: The Wall Street Journal estimated that your businesses, which I believe are Subway sandwich shops and UPS stores, very successful, brought you last year over $6 million dollars.
REP. JOHN FLEMING, R-LA: Yeah, that's before you pay 500 employees. ... The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million. And so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe only $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment....
(audience boos)
Settle down. Let's ignore for a moment that this gentleman seems to have an incredibly shitty accountant who has advised him to pay personal income tax on money he reinvests in his business. Let's blow past the fact that under Obama's plan, instead of having $400,000 to upgrade your stores and buy equipment, you'd have $381,000. Let's focus on the $200,000, you say, a year you need to feed your family. Now, I'm gonna tell you something you may not know. There is a place where you can buy a full 12 inches of meat sub deliciousness for $5.
(wild audience cheering and applause)
Now, by my calculations, $200,000 will buy you 40,000 feet of food. That is 8 miles of room temperature honey-cured technically turkey. Perhaps you've heard of these places, they're everywhere! So, problem solved.
....
But there is, sadly, only one Papa Bear.
BILL O'REILLY (9/19/2011): If you tax achievement, some of the achievers are going to pack it in. Again, let's take me. My corporations employ scores of people. They depend on me to do what I do so they can make a nice salary. If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50%, which is very possible, I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this. I like my job, but there comes a point when taxation becomes oppressive.
(mocking laughter from audience)
So if taxes are raised, Bill O'Reilly might quit his Fox show? (wild audience cheering) Well, that brings us to our new segment...
Video and transcript below the fold.
Let's start in Washington. Monday morning, President Obama took to the White House Rose Garden where, appearing in front of the very doorknobs that might be hitting him in the ass next November, he talked debt and taxes.
BARACK OBAMA (9/19/2011): Today, I am laying out a set of specific proposals to finish what we started this summer.
You mean, Fort Awesome?
Treehouse I was building on the White House lawn. Yes!
BARACK OBAMA (9/19/2011): It's a plan that reduces our debt by more than $4 trillion dollars, and achieves these savings in a way that is fair.
(in Obama voice) "Ah, what we'll do is, one at a time, excuse ourselves to go to the bathroom, then we will climb out of the window and into Canada."
No, seriously. What's the plan?
BARACK OBAMA (9/19/2011): It comes down to this. We have to prioritize. ... Either we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, or we're gonna have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare. We can't afford to do both. Either we gut education and medical research, or we've got to reform the tax code so that the most profitable corporations have to give up tax loopholes that other companies don't get. We can't afford to do both. This is not class warfare. It's math.
(audience cheers)
Let me say this. Barack Obama knows one thing. You can never go wrong appealing to Americans' love of math. Probably something he stole from the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Mathcraft.
(in nerd voice) "My character Rhombus wears a Pythagorus hat. It gives him a +2 angle power."
That's how you're gonna sell your program to Americans? You're gonna love it? It's not war, the thing we're best at, it's math the thing we're 32nd out of 65 in the world at? Or, as we like to think of it, the top 10%?
But the President has finally drawn a stark policy difference between himself and his opponents. We must either raise taxes on the wealthy or risk the very fabric of our 70-year social safety net. The Republicans must be able to counter this by putting a human face on the burden this will place on our nation's most vulnerable wealthy. Cue Louisiana Republican Congressman and small business owner of 33 Subway sandwich shops, John Fleming.
9/19/2011:
CHRIS JANSING: The Wall Street Journal estimated that your businesses, which I believe are Subway sandwich shops and UPS stores, very successful, brought you last year over $6 million dollars.
REP. JOHN FLEMING, R-LA: Yeah, that's before you pay 500 employees. ... The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million. And so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe only $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment....
(audience boos)
Settle down. Let's ignore for a moment that this gentleman seems to have an incredibly shitty accountant who has advised him to pay personal income tax on money he reinvests in his business. Let's blow past the fact that under Obama's plan, instead of having $400,000 to upgrade your stores and buy equipment, you'd have $381,000. Let's focus on the $200,000, you say, a year you need to feed your family. Now, I'm gonna tell you something you may not know. There is a place where you can buy a full 12 inches of meat sub deliciousness for $5.
(wild audience cheering and applause)
Now, by my calculations, $200,000 will buy you 40,000 feet of food. That is 8 miles of room temperature honey-cured technically turkey. Perhaps you've heard of these places, they're everywhere! So, problem solved.
REP. JOHN FLEMING, R-LA (9/19/2011): Again, if you go after the higher income earners, you're also going after the job creators. ... So whatever is cut out of those earnings is money taken out of capital for reinvestment for creating more jobs, opening up more locations.
More locations? At long last, sir? We don't need more Subways. I'll show you. We sent Wyatt Cenac to the nearest Subway. Wyatt, where are you right now?
WYATT CENAC: I'm right here, Jon.
And by the way, the only reason they opened a Subway next to our studio was that the one inside our studio couldn't handle all the business.
It's right over there. You don't normally see it on camera. But it smells like a loaf of bread took a shit.
So let's find.... Taxes go up. You may find yourself, at times, more than 20 sandwich lengths away from the next Subway store, for they are plentiful. But there is, sadly, only one Papa Bear.
BILL O'REILLY (9/19/2011): If you tax achievement, some of the achievers are going to pack it in. Again, let's take me. My corporations employ scores of people. They depend on me to do what I do so they can make a nice salary. If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50%, which is very possible, I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this. I like my job, but there comes a point when taxation becomes oppressive.
(mocking laughter from audience)
So if taxes are raised, Bill O'Reilly might quit his Fox show? (wild audience cheering) Well, that brings us to our new segment...
I shouldn't poke fun. Bill's just standing up for a shrinking exploited minority.
BILL O'REILLY (9/19/2011): Right now, taxpayers with incomes above $1 million dollars represent just 0.2%, not 2%, 0.2% of all income tax returns. Yet the million-dollar babies pay 21% of all the federal income tax!
CLAYTON MORRIS (8/20/2011): Millionaires are disappearing from America.
The super rich will go extinct. We'd add them to the Endangered Species list, but you know how much they despise government regulation. Oh! Cruel irony! People, everyday America loses more and more millionaires to abusive individual and corporate tax rates. Their habitats are slowly disappearing.
Their watering holes drying up.
If we don't act quickly, these once plentiful creatures will be relegated to zoos and heartbreaking documentaries.
(PSA commercial)
Hi, I'm Jon Stewart. (♫ Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" plays in background) Will you be an angel for a helpless multi-millionaire? Every day, James Merriwether Phillips, Meester James to his domestic staff, and thousands more like him live in fear that the top marginal tax rate will be raised from its current 35% to 39.6%.
(multi-millionaire starts crying)
But you can help. For just most of what you earn in a year, you can help James make up that difference. Call now, because he wants the money now. We'll be right back.
Jon then had Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R) on as the guest. Of course, this ran long, so here's the full extended interview in 3 parts.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert looked at the growing economic problems in Europe with Chrystia Freeland.
He then actually covered
#OccupyWallStreet!
Again, you know what to do. Spread these videos from Jon Stewart around to your friends. His framing of the issue can break through to people who don't follow this stuff as closely as we do. People need to start waking up, and Jon can serve as the alarm clock.