She’s cute, seems sincere, and certainly is a breath of fresh air for the Democratic party - but she’s not an engineer, has likely never gotten her hands dirty doing anything, or ever muttered “Oh Lord, pleeeeze let me git it back the way it wuz (like a Tesla owner?)”.
So what we get is hubris, devoid of the details for getting there. So in many ways, she’s another pied piper like Donald Trump.
Hope I’m wrong, but she reeks of the Donald stuff.
As for the proposed marginal rates? Well Bannon likely lost his job pushing for a 45% marginal rate. Thinking the rich owed it after being cheated out of their destruction…
So what chance does her proposal really have? And isn’t it more important to have something to show for your efforts instead of another meme or catchy youtube?
New Clownposse = Old Clownposse
We need to find a way out. Little steps. Instead of impeaching Trump, put him in an orange jumpsuit for tax evasion - immediately after serving out his term in 2024. Now THAT would set an example for rich folks. They’d be bringing in their piggy banks for sure
Peddle that b.s. elsewhere. Hardcore BoingBoingers stay informed.
After graduation, she returned home and became a community organizer. However, with the recession taking hold, along with the financial issues her family faced after her father’s death in 2008 from cancer, Ocasio-Cortez took multiple low-wage restaurant jobs to help keep them afloat.
Despite Crowley’s 10-to-1 fundraising advantage over Ocasio-Cortez, the latter carried out a smart and organized grassroots campaign
You know, similar to how things were before St. Ronnie.
@codinghorror: It’s not like the public and the IRS have no idea who is making this kind of scratch. Would be pretty simple for the IRS to prosecute the cheaters, even in the first year. Thanks, Forbes and Fortune magazines!
Since all the “loopholes” for us peons were eliminated last year, seems all it takes is a simple bit of legislation to wipe out loopholes for all US taxpayers. Let’s start with making capital gains and interest income tax rates progressive (here’s where the marginal rate of 70% would really put the screws to the already obscenely wealthy), and reinstatement of heavy inheritance tax for liquid assets and expensive (say, north of $2M) houses on lands not producing commercial agricultural goods in excess of the home’s ‘value’.
wait? what? you think trump is cute, sincere, and a breath of fresh air? cause that’s the transitive connection you just made.
trump is a self-serving narcissist who has risen to power using his family’s wealth and a racist platform.
and that’s not even saying anything he wouldn’t admit to himself. there aren’t many - if any - parallels in the modern democrat’s party that i can think of.
The 91 percent bracket of 1950 only applied to households with income over $200,000 (or about $2 million in today’s dollars). Only a small number of taxpayers would have had enough income to fall into the top bracket – fewer than 10,000 households.
The New Deal post WWII was funded largely in part by a 94% income tax on every dollar of income earned over $25,000 per year (roughly $325,000 in today’s dollars). Seemed to work pretty well.
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.
An angle that often gets overlooked in these discussion about having high upper tax brackets is that even if they don’t bring in revenue to the feds they serve very important purposes in the economy.
Most wealthy people find ways to avoid paying large amounts of taxes so they donate to non-profits and so forth, creating jobs for folks in those sectors - (humanities, arts and education). In the case of corporate taxes businesses will purchase capital equipment and make the used stuff available in the surplus market, rather than pay tax. There’s a pretty good argument that the whole late 20th century consumer electronics boom happened due to the abundance and availability of surplus equipment from high-tech industry, (much of which trickled out of the WWII and cold-war efforts, but was certainly accelerated downstream by a tax environment that favored buying new gear and writing off the old).
It’s basic Keynesian stuff, not having a tax environment with an asymptotic structure just encourages hoarding cash beyond some point.
Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that in a progressive tax rate system, not all income for a high earner is taxed at such a high rate. Rather, rates increase on each additional level of income, with dramatic increases on especially high earnings, such as $10 million.
The headline is indeed lazy and misleading, perpetuating misunderstandings about how taxes work and making Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal sound much more extreme and poorly thought out than it is.
It’s a tax rate of 70% on earnings in excess of $10M, not a 70% tax rate for those earning in excess of $10M.
Whereas, when Reagan cut the top tax rate to 35%, the rich breathed a sigh of relief and ponied up their fair share. Tax shelters became a thing of the past and the IRS was forced to disband their enforcement division, for lack of work.
