Democrats’ Policies Might Not Work. Does That Matter?
Fudging the details of a proposal is fine. Ignoring reality is not.
Think it through.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
A very bad idea seems to be spreading from the Republican Party to some Democrats. That’s the argument that “it probably doesn’t matter” whether the policies they’re proposing would “work.” That’s how Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution puts it about a 70 percent marginal tax rate for the rich, proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He’s reading good political science, but he’s drawing the wrong conclusions.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying that such a tax is a bad idea. I’ll leave that to the experts. (See several good items here at Bloomberg Opinion on the subject.) All I’m saying is that pushing policies without believing they’re any good is a big mistake.