AOC 2020! Honestly, she could win this.
She won’t be eligible until 2024. She’s too young. It’s in the Constitution 
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The super-rich are the people most capable of moving themselves and their assets. This would cause a lot of relocation - potentially reducing overall tax take. Don’t forget that even at lower marginal tax rates, the rich still pay the largest proportion of income tax. In the UK, the top 1% pay something like 30% of income tax receipts, and the top 10% 60%. Even persuading a relatively small number to leave can make things a bad deal
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This sort of eat the rich stuff, is mana for Trump. It won’t just fill his re-election coffers, it will be used to scare marginal voters into voting for him. The Democrats need to do the world a favour and pick a centrist who can attract Republican and non-aligned votes and win the Presidency.
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I know that taxes are one obvious way to try to correct massive imbalances in society but isn’t that a little late?
Shouldn’t things like REGULATIONS be in place to make sure that massive imbalances never happen in the first place?
Should a family like the Waltons be able to extract billions out of the economy each year by crushing local stores, then paying employees as little as possible so they have to be on tax-funded-state-support and then squeeze local cities to dodge property taxes?
Little late to tax them after the fact, they make millions suffer in the meanwhile for years.
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AOC has intentions for course-correction all the way across the board. She was never a single-issue candidate.
Considering our short timeline to stop the effects of man-made climate change as well as economic disparity in our country, this is logically one of the best issues to tackle from the start.
It’s like making your cheapskate spouse pay to clean up an accident that needs attention right now out of his windfall paycheck and waiting until you get home to work out a new household budget.
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This is why California and New Jersey are home to no rich people at all. They have all moved to Alabama.
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This is smells like correlation not causation. Yes Democrats got it right, but they also tend to be the ones with degrees in higher education. I bet if you broke this down by people with/without secondary education the charts would look similar.
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Not easily, and not without paying a significant price. That price would include their U.S. citizenship (the U.S. taxes you wherever you live, and tax treaties are designed to ensure you pay the country with the highest total taxes), a jarring change in lifestyle (e.g. leaving a primary residence, community, and/or support system you’re comfortable with in a relatively stable country), and whatever financial costs need to be paid to move all assets out of the country (the movement of capital across borders is more fluid than that of labour, but there are people and governments looking to wet their beaks at every turn).
That’s not to say UHNWIs don’t sometimes do all of those things, but it’s not a walk in the park.
Certainly more wealthy people will donate to his campaign than they might otherwise, but it should be clear to the vast majority of those marginal voters that this tax won’t affect them (or their children or grandchildren). The Know-Nothing 27% who are still operating under the delusion that they’ll be making over $10-million/year anydaynowrealsoon will continue to vote for the GOP as they always have.
This has been the Third Way mantra chanted by the DNC establishment since 1991. Given a candidate or incumbent with rock star charisma and an Overton Window that hadn’t been pushed completely into conservative crazyville and economic recoveries that didn’t only benefit the top 10%, it was a somewhat reliable strategy. Now all it’s doing is alienating anyone under age 40 with brains enough not to vote for the GOP.
Under the current political climate in America and given both parties’ commitments to the neoliberal consensus to one degree or another, a “centrist” can’t (and in some cases won’t) push for things like true single-payer universal health insurance, a new Glass-Steagall rule, living wage legislation, or a progressive climate tax that applies to corporations and the ultra-wealthy in an equitable manner.
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At some point, there’s not really much useful difference between correlation and causation, when you’re talking about the relationship between voting Republican, being un- or under-informed, and being un- or under-educated. Chicken? Egg? Who cares?
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If I recall correctly that rate actually increased to 96% for a year or so around 1947.
This income tax rate is one of the examples I use to stimulate the social imagination of my students when considering questions of the form Why are things the way they are instead of very different from the way they are?
The way things are is not ‘the natural order’, is not inevitable, and in fact will change. The question I want to leave them with is: will their values have a say in the way things change?
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Certainly, I think we should let her finish her job, and not judge her unless she impeaches him really badly. I mean she should be presumed innocent, right?
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This. It is not the 40s or 50s anymore. The 1%, and more explictly the top 0.3%, have the resources to move anywhere and enjoy the life style they are accustomed to. If you just jack up the taxes on their bracket they will use the resources available, up to and including relocation.
I think other tax means should be explored, like a progressive rate tax on capital gains that match or exceed the standard rates now. Also the addition of a high income tax tier, at perhaps 50%.
But in the end, isn’t everyone trying to get more? Isn’t that part of America - I’m not saying fuck everyone else, but I’m not handing out fist fulls of cash just so I live paycheck to paycheck either. The tax codes, amounts, and tiers need to reflect that. There is a pretty wide spread between “middle class” incomes over the US. Proposals that impose heavy taxes on gross assets over a few million seem rather limiting if you are living in an area where home prices are over $500/sq ft.
I’m impeaching him right now.
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No. I want a sustainable society, so that my daughter doesn’t have to live in a hellscape in the future. Not all of us are out for ourselves, but are genuinely interested in trying to build a sustainable where we ALL benefit.
They should reflect the fact that we do better when we all contribute to the commons. The fact that so much of our public infrastructure is crumbling is a testament to that. Most of us probably do not want to live in Mad Max in the coming years, they’d much rather live in a functioning, environmentally sustainable country that thinks about the future.
Oh no…/s I’m okay with more taxes if our public infrastructure that I use on a daily basis improves for all of us.
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The Democrats need to do the world a favour and pick a centrist who can attract Republican and non-aligned votes and win the Presidency.
Who are these people, though? I’ve noticed they seem to be a lot fewer than many think, especially compared to the “team players” who will never vote for anyone who doesn’t sport an “R” beside their name. And it’s been the (losing) strategy of the Dems for a while now. Maybe try something different? The so- called “radicals” got a lot of new voters out. Maybe that is the key.
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As an engineer and manager of engineers, please, please, PLEASE don’t populate our government with a bunch of engineers. One or two would be plenty, to add a problem-solving perspective. AOC has a much better background, both in terms of education and experience, to be a legislator.
The scary thing is, that first paragraph, as wrong as it is, is the most coherent part of your post. It goes even further off the rails!
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That says more about our current situation, and how out-of-control inequality has become, than it does about the impracticality of 50’s-era tax codes.
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And that is deeply misogynistic and condescending as hell, to boot!
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