Newly minted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has made a scandalous political mistake, and it’s not the one that’s all over the news.
The video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop as a young woman is everywhere, but it is only a distraction. Despite strong bipartisan support for college kids having fun, the mainstream media reported breathlessly on conservative outrage that didn’t exist. Newsweek started a headline with “Conservatives Mock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for College Dancing Video,” though the piece failed to point out any conservative who did any mocking. Reuters reported that “Twitter comments [about the video] broke along partisan lines,” but failed to find a single Republican who criticized it. CNN reported on the supposed controversy but similarly couldn’t name a single person who disliked the video.
If so many conservatives are supposedly fired up over a young woman twirling on a rooftop, why can’t the media name a single one? The only person bothered by the video also happened to be nameless: whoever was behind the now-deleted Twitter account called @AnonymousQ1776, which initially posted the video. One no-name Twitter account, whose handle references a fringe conspiracy theory, does not represent any party or ideology. It’s just one person with an old video and a chip on his shoulder.
In fact, a number of prominent conservatives publicly dismissed the video as nothing more than innocent fun: Ben Shapiro, Mark Hemingway, and James O’Keefe just to name a few.
What the Right is really scandalized by isn’t Ocasio-Cortez’s dancing video, but her tax plan. She has proposed taxing people with very high incomes at a 70 percent marginal rate, instead of the 37 percent tax bracket currently in place.
Many conservatives have expressed concern that this tax plan would be as bad as Venezuela’s, China’s, or those of the Nordic socialist states. The taxes she proposed are not as high as those in other nations. They’re even higher.
Sweden taxes its wealthiest citizens at a 61.75 percent marginal rate. Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands all have top marginal tax rates between 50-60 percent. Ocasio-Cortez proposed a top marginal tax bracket that is far higher than those of the socialist countries that her supporters admire.
The highest earners in China must pay a 45 percent marginal income tax rate. Venezuela’s top marginal tax rate is only 34 percent, but rampant government-boosted inflation and high taxes on goods and services have all but destroyed its economy.
In theory, this drastic new tax plan would help fund the Green New Deal, the ambitious plan to get America off of fossil fuels and totally carbon neutral within 10 years. In reality, it would incentivize the wealthiest Americans to remove their wealth from our economy. Ocasio-Cortez has yet to recognize that the same people earning enough to pay a 70 percent marginal income tax rate are also earning enough to leave this country for somewhere with lower taxes. One need not be superrich to flee high taxes; it’s more common than you think. Economists forecasted an exodus of 800,000 people from New York and California due to the high state tax rates. Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands are home, at least on paper, to many multimillionaires who relocate to avoid high taxes elsewhere.
Defenders of this tax plan say it’s less severe than America’s 1950s top marginal tax rate of 91 percent. That tax rate only kicked in for people making, in today’s dollars, more than $3.5 million per year. In contrast, the current top tax bracket kicks in when someone earns their 315,001th dollar in a given year. Ocasio-Cortez has not given specifics about the income level that she wants to tax at 70 percent. Someone should ask her sooner rather than later. But so far, any serious questions have been drowned out by a sea of defensive praise for rooftop dancing.
While Republicans rightly denounce her tax policy, the media pretends like we’re mad about an innocuous video. Not only is the press lying about conservatives, they are making no attempt to get the truth about Ocasio-Cortez’s tax plan. Every 2020 contender is watching Ocasio-Cortez and watching how potential voters react to her. Right now, they are learning that they can propose astronomical taxes and dance their way out of answering for it.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Georgetown University.
