WHOOPI: I am outraged. I’m outraged. I looked at my cable bill. I looked at my phone bill. And there are taxes on there … it goes anywhere from $10 to $15 a month that I’m paying for stuff I don’t know. There are letters — the LMNOPQ fund of the jacka-jacka … and no one says, “The what!?” And when you think about it, it’s every month that you’re paying it. So it’s ten bucks here or fifteen bucks here or twenty-five dollars there.

Then you’re writing out — they take the 50 percent of your income and it goes to God knows where. When I first started working I said, “OK. I don’t mind paying out because I know it’s going to go for some stuff I hate, and some stuff that I like.” But I’m looking and I see my friends who haven’t done as well as I have financially. You know, they’ve got kids, they’ve got house payments, they’ve got mortgages. They’ve got gas to put in their cars. Friends who are putting, you know, in a 500 gallon or 2500 gallon tank — they’re only taking 50 gallons of oil because they can’t afford it! They can’t afford it. I don’t understand why —

LIZ: Well, it’s pretty discouraging when Congress keeps doing these earmarks where they consign millions of dollars to stupid things like, you know, “We’ll study the button,” or “We’ll study ladybugs,” or something. Or they build these bridges to nowhere in Alaska. And then you do resent paying your taxes when that’s happening.

WHOOPI: I don’t mind paying them. I resent this idea that everything I do now is taxed. And I get no bang for my buck. I feel like I want to just dump tea in the river, because there’s no representation. And if I’m bitching about this, I can’t imagine what somebody who’s just living, literally, paycheck to paycheck is going through. Because there’s no government agency that says, “You know what? We’re going to pay this much to the oil company so that everybody can get the oil.”

LIZ: Well, I don’t believe we’re ever going to get rid of big taxes as long as America is in the industrial munitions manufacture business. And that’s the business the government is in — is constantly making these war machines and then they go obsolete and they junk billions of dollars worth of ‘em. And they just go on and on. And I don’t know. I know we have to protect ourselves, but —

WHOOPI: Here’s what started it, just so you guys know.

JOAN: Yes, let’s hear.

WHOOPI: I had a radio program, which did not work out. Very smartly, I was in a pay-or-play deal. So everybody said, “You know what? This isn’t working. But, yes, we know we still have to pay you.” They were supposed to give me my lump sum. Well it turns out that you can no longer be given a lump sum without 10 or 15 percent being taken out — as a penalty …

JOAN: As a penalty.

WHOOPI: … for getting paid a lump sum.

LIZ: Well, that makes no sense.

WHOOPI: It makes no sense. And what you have to do is you have to then defer the other half of your money. So you can take some now and then you can’t take it for another year.

LIZ: And then the company disappears and you never get it.

WHOOPI: Well, yeah. Or they go under. I said to the guy, “Who made this law? Did anybody put it on the books to discuss it?” No. This went into law about a year ago. If you’re getting ready to get paid a lump sum, you have a 20 percent tax on it — tax on top of the 50 percent they already took.

LESLEY: What always surprises me is when you see these people on Wall Street just cleaning up. Did you see the story the other day where these hedge fund owners — in this crisis and this recession that we’re in — in this Wall Street debacle, are making 3.5 billion dollars? And they’re the ones fighting taxes. They don’t —

JOAN: And they’re the ones that don’t pay the taxes!