Ryan Daniel Moran (Capitalism.com) reacts to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "tax the rich" statement, praising her marketing skills while arguing the slogan is divisive. He contends wealthy Americans already face high combined tax burdens (federal, state, local, payroll, Medicare/Medicaid and other levies), criticizes deficit spending and money-printing as the real fiscal drivers, and advocates for collaborative incentive-based solutions rather than group-targeted taxation rhetoric. The video closes with channel promotion.
Questions this video answers
37% (speaker says top federal rate reduced from 39% to 37%).
On incomes over $500,000 (speaker's example).
"Over 8%" (as stated by the speaker).
About 60% (speaker's repeated estimate).
Chapters
I love Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I love her. And it's not just because she's the second most attractive member of Congress, first one obviously being Mitch McConnell. It's also because AOC is a phenomenal marketer. She's great at getting attention. She's great at persuasion. She's great at answering questions in the way that brings it back to her ideals. And she often has a way of standing for things that her base is going to rally behind and even if they don't really mean anything. For example, tax the rich. Wearing that dress was a great way to get attention for her to flip the script and draw attention to the things that she then talked about in the comments of her Twitter posts and her Instagram posts, which was health care and funding climate change and all of the other things that she wants to tax the rich for. Of course, tax the rich is just a way to rile up her base. The reality is, if you look at the policies that her and the people who stand on her side of the aisle stand for, why didn't you tax anybody at all? Well, we have a president right now who's running up record deficits. Why can't you just print your way into funding health care and free education and all these things? Congress doesn't really believe in having balanced budgets. They don't really believe in having this group pay for this. They print their way through it. Now, this is not exclusive to Democrats or Joe Biden. President Trump did it. George W. Bush did it. Barack Obama did it. Going all the way back. No, I left out Bill Clinton because Bill Clinton, a Democrat, actually had a surplus. But not anymore. We have multi trillion dollar deficits. We just print our way through things. So I don't really know why we have to tax the rich. Maybe we don't. According to some politicians, if you look at what they voted for and what their budgets are, if they really cared about taxing the rich, then we wouldn't have deficits all over the place. We would maybe cut spending on things that shouldn't be there. But the most impressive thing about what AOC is doing is she is doing what Scott Adams would say, thinking past the sale. That means she's getting the people who are looking at her dress and talking about her dress to think about something and make an assumption about it. Meaning the assumption is that we don't tax the rich. This is beautiful marketing, because when AOC draws attention to the idea of we should tax the rich, it assumes that we're not taxing the rich. Right now. And if you look at the narrative that people who stand for passing higher taxes say, it's that, well, we get all these tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, the millionaire class is getting rich off the backs of hard working Americans. That was actually a pretty good Bernie Sanders. I just pulled that one out of thin air. I'm pretty impressed with myself. You think AOC would vote for me? No. Is it because I'm a white male? Anyway.
And I love having this debate with people who are not business owners or who aren't the rich or who aren't in the top 1%. Because once you run the numbers, the argument goes silent really, really quick. Since Republicans under the Trump administration passed the latest tax cut, the top federal tax rate was taken from 39% to 37%. So if you make over $500,000, those dollars are taxed at a rate of 37%. But that's just the federal government. For example, AOC's home state of New York has a state income tax of over 8%. California's is even higher. So those two things combined are 45% tax rate. Then you factor in local taxes and you factor in, in some cases, county taxes. Plus my favorite, payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are a tax that most people don't see because they're only held by the employer or the business owner. Especially if you're self employed, you're paying it twice, which really, really sucks. Payroll taxes are taxes for having employees. What? Why do we tax this? This is ridiculous. And they also include things like Medicare and Medicaid, which end up being another 15%.
Add all that together and now you're sitting at 60, 60% taxes. This is after the Trump tax cut. That doesn't even include property taxes, that doesn't include sales taxes, this doesn't include investment taxes. Capital gains doesn't include any of that. And before somebody says, well, capital gains tax or tax at a lower rate, Capital gains taxes are interest on money you already paid tax on. It's a double tax by nature. So anyway, I'm ranting a little bit all of this to say AOC got our way. We do tax the rich. In fact, when you consider that almost half the country doesn't pay any federal income tax, you might say that only the rich pay taxes. So aoc, you won't. Great job and great job at marketing and getting us to think past the assumption that the rich don't get taxed, because they absolutely do. We get taxed quite a bit now. I don't even want to touch the fact that she was photographed with a billionaire and a world renowned fashion designer on her way out of the gala. It's really not my place to throw shade at all. I actually just want to tip my cap to AOC for being a fantastic marketer. But for everybody else who is seeing what she is doing, she's getting her way. She's riling up the base and those who oppose it. And you're talking about her. She's a phenomenal promoter at getting people to talk about what she wants to talk about. It bothers me in times like these, when we divide people into groups. It bothers me in times like these that we see each other as black, white, trans, straight, rich, poor, and we just divide people into groups. This bothers me. And this is actually the only thing that bothers me about what AOC did. She takes this group, the rich, and makes them a group to be talked about and to be talked about in a way that they should be treated differently, that they should be taxed differently, that they should have different rules. And I get it, right? Like you need to have a stable society, which if we need to have a stable society, then we should have a balanced budget and not print our way to pay for things, which is exactly what AOC has voted for over and over and over again. I just think it's a little bit hypocritical that she stands for trans rights and women's rights and equality and then brings up this boogeyman, another group for us to cast judgment at. And yes, I'm a white rich male, so I'm not allowed to talk about any of this. But I just think the world needs more unifying talk and not having us split into groups. And I would have nothing to say about this topic. And if AOC just simply said, balance the budget or let's pay for health care, or let's pay for education, or even just raise taxes, but as soon as you put people into groups and you say things like, we need to tax that group, not me, that group over there, and someone should do something about this, preferably that group that I want to blame. And you're not allowed to judge this group, but I'm going to judge this group, that's why we feel so divided in this country, because we put people into groups and then we judge them, that's the only thing that bothers me about this. The truth is rich people are really good at understanding the tax code. And the tax code is written to incentivize certain behaviors and entrepreneurs and capitalists love being incentivized. That's what makes us entrepreneurs and capitalists in the first place. So we're really good at finding ways to. To delay tax payments and to save money over here. And most importantly, as entrepreneurs and capitalists, we're creators. Regardless of what the government does. If you tax us at 80%, we're still gonna create, we're still gonna be building things. We may not be doing it in the way that you think we should do it, but we're gonna keep creating. We're still gonna be rich, we're still gonna keep producing. And instead of making a group out of us and blaming us, maybe we could collaborate. And by collaborate, maybe we could create incentive structures not to give money to government, but to solve the problems that challenge us the most. Instead of taxing rich people and investing into green energy, we could just incentivize more green energy.
Turns out Elon Musk has proved there's a lot of money in green energy. When you have incentives aligned to solve problems, entrepreneurs and capitalists come in and solve those problems. But when you make those the enemy, well, then we're just going to find loopholes. Then we're just going to find other incentives in the tax code because, like, we kind of earned it. So I love aoc. I think she is a brilliant marketer and much smarter than most Republicans give her credit for. You just have to see the hand that she's actually playing. She is getting attention so that she can shine a spotlight on the things that she actually wants to advocate. I just wish that she had more collaborative communication rather than divisive communication. That was her criticism of the previous president. And so she should lead by example, by having unifying language rather than the opposite. I'm Ryan from capitalism.com. if you like this video, then you'll really like the one on your screen about paying fewer taxes. If you're an entrepreneur or capitalist.
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