Noah Smith, Columnist

Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% Tax Idea Isn’t Very Radical

It won’t do much to discourage people from working, raise revenue or lower inequality.

January 7, 2019 at 6:00 PM EST

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

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The other day, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines (yet again) with a bold proposal — a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income of more than $10 million a year. This tax, Ocasio-Cortez declared, would fund her so-called Green New Deal, a still-developing plan to eliminate fossil-fuel energy by 2030 and lower inequality.

“Call me a radical,” she declared. Let's hope she was being tongue-in-cheek, because the plan isn’t really that radical. The top marginal tax rate was 73 percent in 1920, more than 90 percent during the 1950s, and 69 percent in 1981:

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