HOLD ON TO YOUR WALLETS

Democrats are already scrambling for your tax dollars

It's only January 2019, and the 2020 election cycle is upon us. Who can tax the most?

A headline from the Washington Times: 

'Over 90 percent?' Liberals eyeing White House vie for title of highest tax raiser

The story goes on to read:

Democrats eyeing bids for the White House also are competing to see who is willing to go the highest in raising taxes.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York liberal who is too young constitutionally to become president, nevertheless set a benchmark when she suggested in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday that rates for the wealthy could top out at up to 70 percent.Julian Castro, an Obama administration Cabinet official who has announced a testing-the-waters presidential committee, quickly jumped on the bandwagon by telling ABC News that it’s time the wealthy be tapped for their “fair share.”“There was a time in this country where the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent,” Mr. Castro said in praising Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s vision. “Even during Reagan’s era in the 1980s, it was around 50 percent.”Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, who also has formed a presidential exploratory committee, hasn’t committed to a high-water mark, but she too spoke approvingly of major rate hikes.“Look, there was a time in a very prosperous America — an America that was growing a middle class, an America in which working families were doing better generation after generation after generation — where the top marginal rate was well above 50 percent,” Ms. Warren said on CNBC in July. “Ninety percent sounds pretty shockingly high. But what I’m trying to get at is this is not about negotiating over specific numbers.”

And then from Townhall Finance:

Ocasio-Cortez’s Fiscal Plan Will Lead To Giant Tax Hikes On Middle-Class & Lower-Income Americans

You'll have to read it to believe it, because it refuses to acknowledge real-world economics from the Democrats, at least the far-left socialist variety.

Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute opines in National Review about AOC’s proposed tax hike on the rich. He starts with a very appropriate economic observation.

A common liberal retort is that the economy survived 91 percent income-tax rates under President Eisenhower and 70 percent tax rates through the 1970s. That does not mean those policies raised much revenue. Tax exclusions and high income thresholds shielded nearly everyone from these tax rates — to the degree that the richest 1 percent of earners paid lower effective income-tax rates in the 1950s than today. In 1960, only eight taxpayers paid the 91 percent rate. Overall, today’s 8.2 percent of GDP in federal income-tax revenues exceeds that of the 1950s (7.2 percent), 1960s (7.6 percent), and 1970s (7.9 percent). Those earlier decades were not a tax-the-rich utopia.

But chances are, Warren and Ocasio-Cortez won't make it even to the primaries. One can only hope.