Ocasio-Cortez proposes a 70% tax on the most wealthy to pay for a "Green New Deal".

[The Romulan Republic]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/04/politics ... index.html

Washington (CNN)Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed taxing the wealthy as high as 70% to fund a climate change plan she's pushing called the "Green New Deal."

"There's an element where, yeah, people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes," the freshman New York lawmaker said in an interview with Anderson Cooper that's slated to air Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes."
In a clip of the interview that was released on Friday, Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez about the specifics of the "Green New Deal," a plan that calls for reducing carbon emissions to zero and moving the country off of fossil fuels in 10 years.
"Once you get to the tippie-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%. That doesn't mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more," Ocasio-Cortez said.
She also acknowledged that her goal is "ambitious."
"It's going to require a lot of rapid change that we don't even conceive as possible right now," she told Cooper. "What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?"
But she added, "I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country," citing President Abraham Lincoln's issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation and President Franklin Roosevelt pushing for the passage of Social Security.
Asked if she considers herself a radical, Ocasio-Cortez replied, "Yeah, if that's what radical means, call me a radical."
Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to Congress, was sworn into the US House on Thursday. A Democratic-Socialist, she has also pushed Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, canceling all student loan debt and housing as a federal right.

It won't pass the current Congress even if Hell freezes over, of course, but its so nice to see a Democrat who doesn't deal in timid half-measures to address inequality and global crises.

[LadyTevar]

You go girl! This is why they're scared of you!

[Batman]

Funny story-the part when the US economy boomed past WW2 was when you HAD that kind of taxation

[aerius]

In a clip of the interview that was released on Friday, Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez about the specifics of the "Green New Deal," a plan that calls for reducing carbon emissions to zero and moving the country off of fossil fuels in 10 years.

Yeah. Someone needs to sit her down and explain the laws of physics.

[LadyTevar]

In a clip of the interview that was released on Friday, Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez about the specifics of the "Green New Deal," a plan that calls for reducing carbon emissions to zero and moving the country off of fossil fuels in 10 years.

Yeah. Someone needs to sit her down and explain the laws of physics.

Ok, that is a stretch, but there have been studies in the past that have said it's possible -- If the Fossil Fuel Industry plays along. And we all know it will fight that kind of change kicking and screaming all the way.

[Enigma]

Just watch as her giddy optimism gets crushed by reality in a few years time.

[Raw Shark]

Just watch as her giddy optimism gets crushed by reality in a few years time.

At the risk of sounding like... well, me. It's my new goal to do things my Mom doesn't want to hear about while she tries it...

[His Divine Shadow]

That's the kind of talk that needs to become the new normal. Keep dragging that fucking overton window back from over the precipice, one step at a time.

[TimothyC]

Marginal tax rates were that high (and higher even) in the 1950s, and the federal government was not able to pull in enough revenue as a percentage of GDP to make her ideas work. I think she needs a class on history to go with the applied physics.

[Ace Pace]

Marginal tax rates were that high (and higher even) in the 1950s, and the federal government was not able to pull in enough revenue as a percentage of GDP to make her ideas work. I think she needs a class on history to go with the applied physics.

Maybe a better solution is to keep the current tax code and simplify it, aiding collection, removing loopholes and lowering the time burden on the economy of filling out american taxes?

[TimothyC]

Maybe a better solution is to keep the current tax code and simplify it, aiding collection, removing loopholes and lowering the time burden on the economy of filling out american taxes?

That would be a better solution. Heck, I don't actually have a problem with higher marginal rates at the high end, but doing so won't instantly generate a huge windfall.

[K. A. Pital]

Marginal tax rates were that high (and higher even) in the 1950s, and the federal government was not able to pull in enough revenue as a percentage of GDP to make her ideas work. I think she needs a class on history to go with the applied physics.

Here comes the history class:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

Lesson learned? Never trust oligarch viewpoints.

[TimothyC]

Here comes the history class:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

Lesson learned? Never trust oligarch viewpoints.

You do realize that what I said holds true on that link right? Even when marginal tax rates were much, much higher than they are now (and were in the 1990s), total revenue as a percentage of GDP never climbed over 21%. Higher top marginal rates don't provide a huge windfall relative to lower ones. The modern peak was in 2000, when the top marginal rate was..... the same as it was in 2017.

Let me repeat what I said before: I don't actually have a problem with higher marginal rates (and I would like to see the tax code tightened up and simplified), but raising them will not generate the windfall that I think Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wants.

[K. A. Pital]

The difference is in the composition.

First we have established that tax revenue as a GDP share has not changed much. It was not much lower under a higher rate, which means at the very least raising the rates is not going to deplete the state resources.

Next, the reasons can be checked
http://moslereconomics.com/2012/08/27/f ... -revenues/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpora ... -_2009.png

Tax composition has changed. Dramatically. Corporate taxes have been substantially lowered. Payroll taxes mean that wage workers‘ taxation constitutes a larger share of tax revenues by now.

So while the revenue relative to GDP may stay similar to preceding periods, the tax burden will be shifted to the rich. Which is a worthwhile achievement itself.

[Lonestar]

Funny story-the part when the US economy boomed past WW2 was when you HAD that kind of taxation

Hmm makes one wonder if there was anything going on globally, competitor wise, that might have helped that

[The Romulan Republic]

In a clip of the interview that was released on Friday, Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez about the specifics of the "Green New Deal," a plan that calls for reducing carbon emissions to zero and moving the country off of fossil fuels in 10 years.

Yeah. Someone needs to sit her down and explain the laws of physics.

We probably could get off fossil fuels in 10 years if we just collectively said fuck it and went all in on building alternative energy sources (including potentially a heavy investment in nuclear power).

In reality, given the political climate in the US and the system in which we have to work- not a fucking prayer. Hell, at best it'll be over two years before we can even get started at the Federal level.

[aerius]

We probably could get off fossil fuels in 10 years if we just collectively said fuck it and went all in on building alternative energy sources (including potentially a heavy investment in nuclear power).

In reality, given the political climate in the US and the system in which we have to work- not a fucking prayer. Hell, at best it'll be over two years before we can even get started at the Federal level.

You can't, even with unlimited money and full government co-operation. Do you know what doesn't exist? The industrial infrastructure and trained specialists & workers required to a)build all that industrial infrastructure, and b)build the energy sources & grid. This is not a computer game, you don't just max out the education slider and plop down 100 factories & nuke plants.

Let's take building the electrical grid to handle all that new power we'll need to generate. You'll need a ton of transformer stations to step the voltage up & down for distribution. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, no. Power transformers use a special silicon steel alloy in their laminations to get the required efficiency so they don't burn up. Last time I checked, there's only a handful of steel mills in the US that have the equipment for rolling out the plates used in large power transformers. There's fun thing with transformer steel, it tends to be brittle and a bitch to work with compared to regular steels such as the ones used in cars or buildings. You need special rolling equipment to work with it along the trained workers & technicians to run it.

So we'll just order a bunch of rolling mills and get some folks trained to run them, simple enough, right? Well, no. See, rolling mills aren't exactly something you can pull out of 3-D printer. They're giant machines made up of large forgings and other such parts. Someone has to make those forgings so you can make the rolling machines for making the steel that goes into the transformers for your power grid. And funny enough, there's not exactly an abundance of heavy forging presses in the US. You need to start with one of these before you can start building everything else. And of course you need all the trained workers to run it.

This is just one of the countless bottlenecks you'll run into with any plan to modernize the power grid and move towards renewables or nuclear. It takes a lot of time to train the industry workers & specialists and build out the industrial base. In some cases, the workers & knowledge are already lost.

[TimothyC]

Heck, look at cars. There are something like 270 million cars in the US, and 17(ish) million are sold ever year. Now, of those 17 million, only between a quarter and a third of a million are electric. Even if you could magically change over all of the car production in the US to electric cars, you would need to either increase car production by over 50% or reduce the number of cars on the road by about 33% to get rid of all of the internal combustion engine powered cars.

Oh, and you have to get everyone on board with a new(ish) car.

[K. A. Pital]

Heck, look at cars. There are something like 270 million cars in the US, and 17(ish) million are sold ever year. Now, of those 17 million, only between a quarter and a third of a million are electric. Even if you could magically change over all of the car production in the US to electric cars, you would need to either increase car production by over 50% or reduce the number of cars on the road by about 33% to get rid of all of the internal combustion engine powered cars.

Oh, and you have to get everyone on board with a new(ish) car.

Ban or penalize cars with low emission standards and soon you leave people little choice but to buy replacement vehicles. The question is, really, should it be done, not whether it can or cannot be done.

[KraytKing]

Of course the plan can't actually work the way she says it will. I seriously doubt she doesn't know that, if a bunch of Internet nerds can see how unfeasible it is. It's the sort of thing you have to propose in order to get anything at all. A plan that is declared to work in ten years gives people hope, hope for the future, which is sorely lacking these days. The New Deal gave people hope, hope they needed.

[Beowulf]

Ban or penalize cars with low emission standards and soon you leave people little choice but to buy replacement vehicles. The question is, really, should it be done, not whether it can or cannot be done.

Cool. Take cars from poor people.

[Batman]

Did you miss the 'should it be done' bit? He's saying it's possible, NOT that it would be a good idea.

[Elheru Aran]

Did you miss the 'should it be done' bit? He's saying it's possible, NOT that it would be a good idea.

Indeed; it could perhaps work in Europe and some major urban areas that actually have decent public transportation, but in the United States, people are simply too dependent on personal transportation for anything like this to work.

Slowly ratcheting up emissions standards over a period of, say, ten or fifteen years, and collecting the fees from testing to help build public transportation on the other hand, sounds vaguely reasonable. The downside being that this would still hurt a lot of people who couldn't afford the increased testing, and the US is pretty obnoxiously allergic to public transportation. There's a lot of reasons for that, but one big one is that particularly in rural areas, people are simply too spread out for bus service to be cost-and time-effective.

[His Divine Shadow]

It would not work in europe, see yellow wests. This idea of raising fuel taxes is something of a centrist neolib kind of thinking to me ala Macron, though it's prevalent on the left but I don't see it as a leftist kind of thought, something city people with ready access to public transport would think. Poor people use their cars as little as possible already and can't really use them less than is needed so it would affect them the most. Really, all consumption taxes are highly regressive and best avoided. Income tax the top instead to provide alternatives.

[Jub]

Indeed; it could perhaps work in Europe and some major urban areas that actually have decent public transportation, but in the United States, people are simply too dependent on personal transportation for anything like this to work.

Slowly ratcheting up emissions standards over a period of, say, ten or fifteen years, and collecting the fees from testing to help build public transportation on the other hand, sounds vaguely reasonable. The downside being that this would still hurt a lot of people who couldn't afford the increased testing, and the US is pretty obnoxiously allergic to public transportation. There's a lot of reasons for that, but one big one is that particularly in rural areas, people are simply too spread out for bus service to be cost-and time-effective.

Do we have 10 to 15 years to slowly wait for change to even start? We've, by which I mean politicians and businessmen, had our heads up our asses about climate change for so long that we can't just keep taking palatable baby steps. These changes will hurt people, likely myself included, but cars are a major emissions source and any cuts that can be made should be made.