Stephanie Kelton, Columnist

The Wealthy Are Victims of Their Own Propaganda

To escape higher taxes, they must embrace deficits.

February 1, 2019 at 3:00 PM UTC

Stephanie Kelton is a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University. She was the Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and an economic adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.

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A friend sent me an email the other day, complaining about the 70 percent marginal tax rate floated by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the new wealth tax proposed by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Ocasio-Cortez first mentioned the 70 percent rate in response to a question from CNN’s Anderson Cooper about how she proposes to pay for programs like a Green New Deal that could cost trillions of dollars. Higher tax rates, she suggested, might be one part of the answer.