It’s not every day you get to watch a clip of Fox News anchors completely confused by the results of their own polling — since the primary respondents to Fox polls are, of course, Fox viewers, who have been proven time and again to be far less informed than consumers of other forms of news. But dear readers, today is such a day, and you can kind of thank everyone’s favorite new Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or “AOC,” as the cool kids call her.
Her primary message, aside from her focus on the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s reproductive rights, immigration justice… okay, well, her platform is expansive. But one of her primary messages is that of economic equality and the methods by which America could achieve it.
During an interview with CBS’Â 60 Minutes, Ocasio-Cortez proposed a 70 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $10 million when asked how she might fund some of the programs she supports. The social media fallout was a primer on exactly how Republicans like to lie about taxes in order to scare their base into voting against their own best interests. Predictably, they painted her proposal as one that would “take 70 percent of people’s incomes,” which is a notion so laughable that it’s hard to believe they could say it with a straight face. No one has ever proposed such a thing, and they know it.
It’s wild that some people are more scared of a marginal tax rate than the fact that 40% of Americans struggle to pay for at least one basic need, like food or rent.
Imagine if we focused positively, away from fear of the former toward solving the latter.https://t.co/91SoKmhGxx
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 22, 2019
A marginal tax rate is one that applies to a subset of income above a certain amount. In AOC’s proposal, the rate would take 70 percent of each dollar above ten million that someone makes — if they made $10,000,100 in a year, the ten million would be taxed at the normal rate, like anyone else’s taxes — then the $100 over it would be taxed at 70 percent.
But despite Republicans’ best efforts to convince the public that she means if you have $100, her tax policy would leave you with $30, it seems that Americans actually kind of like the idea of people who already have ten million freaking dollars having to pay more taxes on income above that to finance public policy.
After all, taxes are the price of civilized society, and the really really rich people made their money using the same infrastructure everyone else uses to make their own: You use the taxpayer-funded roads to get to work to make your money, and they use them on a much larger scale for all of their employees to use them to drive to work and make them money.
Okay, so Fox News.
These guys, who have made it their job to carry the GOP’s water for them, advancing their policies and their lies about progressive policies, made the silly mistake of asking their viewers — who are definitely not people making more than ten million dollars a year — what they thought of the proposal. They were not amused. In fact, they even managed to try and make it sound like teaching kids to be fair was an “ideology” that those kids then carry throughout their lives.
Uh, yeah.
Watch the clip here:
Featured image via screen capture
