Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and was asked a simple question that any politician worth his salt would hit out of the park for a home run.
How was she going to pay for the trillions of dollars in spending for all the free stuff she was proposing?
"This is an excellent, excellent question," she replied. "I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week – I can't believe I can say that, it's really weird – But one of the things that we saw is, if people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra wealthy – for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he pays as much as his secretary paid, 15 percent tax rate, if corporations paid – if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent ... if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that's $2 trillion right there."
Two trillion a year? Over five years? Ten? Just two of her agenda items – taxpayer-funded college tuition for all ($75 billion a year) and Medicare for all ($1.4 trillion a year) would cost more than the GOP tax cuts save over the next year. And that's not including all the other free stuff she wants to hand out.
She also said it would take $3 trillion to $4 trillion and a carbon tax to create a "renewable energy economy" and claimed the Trump tax cut bill prevents the wealthiest Americans from paying "their fair share."
"One of the wide estimates is that it's going to take $3 trillion to $4 trillion to transition us to 100 percent renewable economy," she continued.
Not even the most radical greens believe we can get anywhere near 100% renewable for decades.
"So we've got $2 trillion from folks paying their fair share, which they weren't paying before the Trump tax bill," she said. "They weren't paying that before the Trump tax bill. If we get people to pay their fair share, that's $2 trillion in 10 years. Now if we implement a carbon tax on top of that, so that we can transition and financially incentivize people away from fossil fuels, if we implement a carbon tax – that's an additional amount, a large amount of revenue that we can have."
You can almost hear her salivating at the prospect of that "large amount of revenue."
Her revenue estimates are wildly, insanely off base. One need only look at France and how the socialist's dream of making the rich pay their "fair share" worked out.
François Hollande's unpopular tax changes that imposed a 75% rate on earnings above €1m (£780,000) will quietly disappear into the history books from Thursday.
The French socialist president announced plans for the controversial measure during his 2012 election campaign as a means of forcing the wealthiest to help dig the country out of economic crisis.
Although supported by the left, the reform sparked accusations of an anti-business agenda. After the "supertax" was announced in September 2012 the government was accused of shooting itself in the foot by risking an exodus of high-profile personalities. Business leaders expressed fears that investors would pull out of France.
That exodus actually occurred. Not surprisingly, the estimated revenue of 30 billion euros never materialized:
Finance ministry studies showed that despite all the publicity, the sums obtained from the supertax were meagre, standing at €260m in 2013 and €160m in 2014, and affecting 1,000 staff in 470 companies. Over the same period, the budget deficit soared to €84.7bn.
Missed it by that much.
Socialists as a group are clueless about economics anyway, but Ocasio-Cortez demonstrates she is particularly dumb.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/heres_how_ocasiocortez_would_pay_for_the_trillions_in_new_spending_she_is_proposing_.html
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