During a 60 Minutes interview, Anderson Cooper asked freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) how we would pay for the infrastructure in the Green New Deal.
AOC answered: "You look at our tax rates in the 60s, and when you have a progressive tax rate system, your tax from, let's say, zero to $75,000 may be 10 percent or 15 percent. But once you get to the tippy-tops, your 10 millionth dollar, you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn't mean all 10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate, but as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more."
You knew this was going to rile up conservatives, like House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, also known as the "David Duke without the baggage."
Who had this hilarious tweet:
It's interesting how conservatives have completely rewritten history in their heads. As Vox has pointed out, the tax rate for the top bracket use to be as high as 90%.
I'm sure if Jeff Bezos was taxed at 70%, he wouldn't be able to survive.
Speaking of Jeff Bezos and Steve Scalise, you don't hear Scalise and other conservatives bitching about corporate welfare, but you'll hear conservatives talk about welfare regarding the poor.
As the Intercept reports, the new Amazon headquarters will cost taxpayers at least $4.6 billion dollars, and on top of receiving taxpayer money, Amazon will put their new warehouses in, or around, federal opportunity zones. This means they'll pay even less in taxes than they already would.
But Amazon is not the first or the last to benefit from corporate welfare, because as Noam Chomsky points out, that's what the rich want.
In America, this sums up how the economic system works: Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor.
"Every time there is a crisis," said Chomsky in an interview. "The taxpayer is called on to bail out the banks and the major financial institutions."
"The rich and powerful do not want a capitalist system. They want to be able to run the nanny state so when they are in trouble the taxpayer will bail them out."
Another aspect of corporate welfare will come in the form of a tax cut, or the gutting of the IRS.
In a report by ProPublica and The Atlantic, the defunding of the IRS has resulted in decreasing their audits of the rich and corporations, and increasing their audits of the lower classes.
According to ProPublica, the government is losing at least $18 billion in tax revenue, and because you need "specialized, well-trained personnel" for auditing corporations and billionaires, auditing of them have gone down.
For the poor, the story is different.
As ProPublica notes, the earned income tax credit is "the government’s largest anti-poverty programs," and it "provides cash to the working poor."
So what are Republicans doing? They're having the IRS go after those who get that money.
ProPublica: "Under continued pressure from Republicans, the IRS has long made a priority of auditing people who receive that money, and as the IRS has shrunk, those audits have consumed even more resources, accounting for 36 percent of audits last year. The credit’s recipients — whose annual income is typically less than $20,000 — are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year. Only people with incomes above $1 million are examined much more frequently."
Having pointed out how Scalise's tweet is hypocritical in the sense that people's "hard-earned money" is actually a welfare system for the rich.
Another reason his tweet is ridiculous ties in to the subject that AOC was discussing the tax increase for, and that is the Green New Deal.
While Scalise and other Republicans preach that their polices saves you money. The reality is that the Republicans inability to accept and deal with climate change means that not only will you lose money now, but you will lose the future of civilization.
Just consider a recent article by the AP, which reported that Alaska is at risk of losing "hundreds of millions of dollars per yer in the coming decades," due to climate change.
"The Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage has projected that the warmer climate could cause the state a net loss of $340 million to $700 million per year," writes the AP.
$250 million to $429 million would be paying for the "damage caused by thawing permafrost and coastal erosion," while $110 million to $270 million would be the cost to maintain certain parts of the states infrastructure.
Conclusion: While Scalise and others get bent out of shape over AOC discussing the tax rate being 70%, and considering that to be "radical." A political party that is still denying that one of humankind's most existential threats is not existent is actually the "radical" if you choose to use that word as a pejorative.
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