Eat the Rich, Eat Your Zoo Animals

Rep. Omar calls for considering a 90% top marginal tax (apparently 70% wasn't enough).

Also, cuts in Defense:

“I’m also one that really looks at the defense budget that we have, Rep. Omar said. “That has increased nearly 50% since 9/11. And so, most of the money that we have in there is much more than with we spend on education, on healthcare.”

That's not remotely true. Medicare alone consumes more money than the DOD. Medicare spending was north of $750B in 2017; the DOD's budget for this year is $686B.

People on the Left get confused about that because their professors put up charts on the wall with the "discretionary budget," which DOD dominates. That gives you the impression that we spend more on DOD than anything else. But most of the Federal budget isn't defined as discretionary, but as entitlements. Social Security and Medicare are each larger than DOD's budget. Military spending is only 16% of the total.

Now you might want to get that down to 2%, and spend the rest on Green New Deals or Free College or Universal Health Care.

By the way, even with a 70% marginal tax you'll still need a lot more money. Even should you zero out defense, you'd save around seven trillion dollars in a decade, and Medicare for All is expected to cost $32 trillion in that time. Add that to the $720 Billion you'd get from the 70% tax, over that decade, and you'd still be over twenty-four trillion short.

Elizabeth Warren, who is smarter than these two younger Congressfolk, has a "wealth tax" that gets you closer. Total wealth in the United States is estimated at $54 Trillion, so you'd only need to take about half of everything.

To cover the first decade of Medicare for All, I mean. The Green New Deal and Free College are another story. And presumably there will be a second decade -- will you have regenerated that $24 Trillion, while operating under such a punishing set of taxes?

There's just not enough money, no matter the tax scheme.

No problem: just print it. The author thinks it could be done without sparking Zimbabwe-style inflation, but really? You're going to dump $2.4 Trillion a year in new money into the market, and it's not going to cause runaway inflation?

This is how you kill an economy. Even the greatest economy in the world.