Conservative tax advocate Mattie Duppler challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) idea to raise the marginal tax rate on the wealthy, saying on Wednesday that most Americans have never paid those high tax rates.
“When we had high marginal tax rates in the ’50s and ’60s, the point is that no one paid them, and in fact, we take in more federal income tax revenue now than we did at that point for that reason,” Duppler, a senior fellow at the National Taxpayers Union, told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on “Rising.”
“It was easy to avoid, and not only was it easy to avoid, we had a tiny, tiny tax base,” she continued. “So no one was paying those tax rates.”
Her comments come after Ocasio-Cortez told Hill.TV on Tuesday that Democrats should rally behind a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income above $10 million in a “full-throated manner.”
Recent polling shows that the majority of Americans appears to be behind the idea.
A Hill-HarrisX poll released on Tuesday found that 58 percent of Americans said they supported increasing the rate.
Duppler, however, said she did not believe the freshman congresswoman was giving a full picture.
“The problem that I have with the congresswoman is not that she decides that she wants a higher tax rate than I think is efficient for the economy,” she said. “It’s that she’s not giving people the full picture, which is when she talks about a [Green New Deal], or ‘Medicare for all,’ which are extremely costly programs, she’s not actually giving the answer on how to pay for them because a high marginal tax rate is not the way to do it.”
— Julia Manchester
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