Ocasio-Cortez does have an idea of what she might want to spend the new tax revenue on. She said in a 60 Minutes interview that it could help fund her vision for a Green New Deal, an ambitious policy platform intended to address the radical need to mitigate the harms of climate change. So, her plan is a tax-and-spend one in that she wants to tax the richest people in the country and spend that money on saving the planet.

People on Wall Street aren’t crazy about the idea, either — at least, that’s what three big-time investors told Business Insider in interviews where they argued the plan wouldn’t do enough to address issues of income inequality and said the $10 million threshold was too high to be effective because there just aren’t enough people making that much money.

Has a high marginal tax rate ever been tried before?

Ocasio-Cortez often points to the 1960s as an example of a time when higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy were in effect during what economist Paul Krugman called “the most successful period of economic growth in our history” in a New York Times op-ed.

Politico has a handy graph showing how the mid-century tax system was undone by Reaganomics, the name given to the economic policies of Republican president Ronald Reagan. As noted by Investopedia, the gist of Reaganomics was cutting taxes and cutting government spending in order to create a “trickle-down” effect: by reducing taxes on the wealthy, everyone would benefit because the rich would re-invest that money in the economy and the people who work for them. But its efficacy has been widely questioned and discredited by many, with the International Monetary Fund showing that the policy doesn’t really work.

Does a 70% marginal tax rate have a shot at becoming a reality?

It’s hard to imagine how something like this might actually pass, especially with the GOP still in control of the Senate and the White House after the 2018 midterms. Democrats made big gains in the House of Representatives, but one chamber of Congress isn’t enough to pass major reforms, especially when the other party is so vehemently opposed to them.

But it shouldn’t be written off as just a pipe dream, either. Similar to the effect Bernie Sanders’s platform had on the 2016 election, Ocasio-Cortez’s policy proposals that generate right-wing outrage are having a different effect: they help shift the political conversation towards compromises that could possibly include aspects of what some might consider political pipe dreams, legitimizing progressive policy proposal in the process.

That seems to already be taking place. Advisors for Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of the first marquee Democrats to announce she’s exploring the possibility of running in the 2020 presidential election and a long-time critic of economic disparities in the country, announced on January 24 that she was proposing a new “wealth tax” on people with more than $50 million in assets. Economists working with Warren told the Washington Post that they believe the plan could raise trillions of dollars from just a fraction of U.S. households over the course of a decade.

AOC’s 70% marginal tax rate is more complicated than simply taxing the rich, but that’s the core of the proposal coming at a time when income inequality has created very real have- and have-not conditions for people. For a politician who thinks the sheer existence of billionaires in this country is immoral, making the world’s rich folks even consider her ideas is a win. Taxing the rich may not be popular with everyone, but it still might have more mainstream appeal than eating them.

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