(Hot Air)
“Call me a radical,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells Anderson Cooper in an interview airing on Sunday’s 60 Minutes. Actually, Ocasio-Cortez’ ideas for fundraisers sound more like the typical Democratic Party dogma — soak the rich. Unfortunately for the freshman Congresswoman, her numbers add up even more poorly than the usual application of that policy:
Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” aims to eliminate carbon emissions within 12 years. Speaking about the ambitious goal, Ocasio-Cortez says, “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?” To pay for the plan, Ocasio-Cortez floated the idea of tax rates as high as 70 percent on the ultra-rich.
“You know, you look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system, your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 percent, et cetera.” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But once you get to, like, the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.”
“I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security. That is radical.”
When asked if she considers herself to be a radical, Ocasio-Cortez says, “You know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.” Ocasio-Cortez wants to return to the confiscatory tax rates of the 1950s and early 1960s, which she explicitly mentions in her argument. Perhaps she doesn’t know that those were repealed by Democratic president John F. Kennedy, but it’s more clear that she doesn’t understand why. Not only did it fail to get the revenue derived, it actually acted to hold back economic growth and resulting tax revenue. The Tax Foundation did an enlightening analysis in 2017 of the impact of the 91% top bracket, when other Democrats hailed it as a Golden Era of Taxation. All it did was shift income into shelters while targeting very few households: Read more
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