« Only radicals have changed this country. »
“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:
Few rookie members of Congress have put such bold ideas on the national agenda and stirred up as much controversy as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who supports a #GreenNewDeal and says, “only radicals have changed this country.” https://t.co/2EBVY5OWLh pic.twitter.com/KihXYpC6eS
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 4,2019
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.
