Republican political strategist and campaign consultant Ed Rollins dismissively referred to 29-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as “the little girl” with a big “mouth.”
That triggered a trademark zinger from the congresswoman, who called Rollins a “walking argument” for a 100 percent tax on misogyny.
Rollins told Fox News’ Lou Dobbs on Friday: “If you’re going to put her out front with her mouth ... the little girl who wants pre-Reagan economics of 70 percent taxes, the Democratic women are basically going to be damaged.”
Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet that such attacks on women are apparently the best argument Republicans have in policy debates.
Ocasio-Cortez has suggested a 70 percent marginal tax rate for income above a certain level for the ultra wealthy in order to fund programs to battle climate change. The Trump administration, backed by Republicans, gave corporations a 40 percent tax cut from 35 percent to 21 percent in 2017, rocketing the nation’s debt by $2 trillion to a total of $21.974 trillion.
But what does Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? “A lot,” said the headline of an opinion piece Saturday in The New York Times by Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman. A similar tax rate was imposed in the U.S. for 35 years after World War II, which included some of the “most successful periods of economic growth in history,” Krugman wrote.
Tax cuts for the ultra wealthy mean far less to them than cuts for people with modest incomes, Krugman noted. And extra money in millions of hands boosts spending.
“A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want,” Krugman wrote.
Nobel economics laureate Peter Diamond — “arguably the world’s leading expert in public finance,” according to Krugman — has calculated the optimum top tax rate at 73 percent. Several other experts back that up.
So Ocasio-Cortez, “far from showing her craziness, is fully in line with serious economic research,” Krugman added. Republican policy to keep taxes on the wealthy low, on the other hand, “rests on research by … well, nobody,” he added.
Krugman’s conclusion: Ocasio-Cortez “definitely knows more economics than almost everyone in the GOP caucus.”
