Did any Fox News viewers actually believe Bill O’Reilly last night when he went on a rampage attacking President Obama and “his acolytes” as not wanting Americans to “accumulate wealth?” Don’t forget this is the same network that can’t stop attacking President Obama (and Michelle Obama, too) as an out-of-touch, golf-playing elitist who takes overly ritzy vacations.

Methinks O’Reilly is upset about his own tax bill more than anything else. He said in this segment that his knees “actually buckled” when he got his tax bill recently. Nevertheless, the multimillionaire made quite a pretense of acting like he and the rest of us are all in the same working-folks boat.

“Why you don’t have as much money as you should have,” O’Reilly said, naming the title of his Talking Points Memo for last night. Low wages? Unemployment? Nope. The problem is taxes are too damned high, says O’Reilly. He must have been banking on people forgetting that just about a year ago, O’Reilly was complaining that half the country is made up of mooching slackers who, he argued at the time, need to pay MORE taxes.

Nevertheless, now O’Reilly claimed:

This is why the U.S. economy is stagnant. American consumers don’t have enough money to spend because the taxman is taking the money.

After accusing President Obama of “spin, pure spin,” for saying that taxes for the middle class are lower than when he took office, O’Reilly did plenty of spinning when he announced:

The people we’ve elected are taking away our security because we can’t accumulate enough money to feel secure in retirement. They’re taking away our legacy because we can’t pass money onto our children. They’re putting us in danger because we can’t protect ourselves from disasters.

This from the network that can’t wait to reform “entitlement spending” aka cut Social Security and Medicare for seniors. I think that might affect their feelings of security, don't you, Bill? And as for not being able to pass money to your children? I have a feeling your little darlings will be getting plenty of money and not needing any soup kitchens. Ever.

O’Reilly continued:

Things are obviously out of control and the Democratic party is primarily to blame. Simply put, President Obama and his acolytes do not want Americans to accumulate wealth. They want to take private wealth away from those who have it and give it to those who don’t have it. And they have succeeded in doing that with an assist from the Bush administration, which ran up colossal debt after 9/11. Taxes in America have reached critical mass.

Oh, really? According to Associated Press, the Obamas are worth somewhere between $1.8 million and $6.8 million. But maybe O’Reilly doesn’t consider that real wealth.

Yet, though he admitted he had the money to pay his knee-buckling taxes, he also pretended to be just one of the folks:

So unless we the American people, the working people, wise up and understand what a bad deal we are getting, we will never have a vibrant economy again.

In an article called, “Why Bill O’Reilly Shouldn’t Report On The Economy,” Media Matters came up with a more technical analysis of this segment. Noting that the tax figures that matter are not the raw revenue numbers but their percentage of the economy, the article pointed out:

Under Obama, tax revenues as a share of the economy are historically low. During Obama’s first term, the ratio of revenue to GDP averaged 15.4 percent, the lowest levels since 1950, according to data from the Tax Policy Center. For context, since 1950, federal revenue has averaged approximately 18 percent of GDP.

These numbers are unsurprising because federal tax rates have declined to “near historic lows” for middle-income Americans, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities determined.

… O’Reilly’s claim that Obama has “succeeded” in redistributing wealth is laughable given the recent economic milestone the U.S. reached—in 2012, the nation’s income inequality gap reached its greatest extent since before the Great Depression. According to the Associated Press, America’s richest one percent saw their incomes rise by 20 percent last year, while the other 99 percent of the country saw their incomes rise only one percent.

University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez recently released research showing that the top one percent has captured 95 percent of the income gains made during the first three years of economic recovery following the recession. 

So, we’re sorry, Bill, if you think too much of your stash is going to things like schools and libraries and national parks and federal disaster relief. But you’ll have to cry me a river long before I believe that you’ve really got it tough or that your budget woes are anything like those of most of the rest of us.