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RUSH: Now, I want to move on from all of this. Audio sound bite time. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I was gonna do this even before she got blown out. Every candidate she endorsed wiped out yesterday. She appeared recently on a podcast called Pod Save America. The cohost is a man named Jon Lovett. And he asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about how she is gonna pay for her agenda. And every time this question comes up it becomes abundantly clear this woman is clueless.

She’s got an economics degree from Boston University, but she is clueless. That matters because to many in the Democrat Party, she is the future. She is the face, she is the star, she has the answers. She’s already supporting Medicare for all, $32 trillion over 10 years. Folks, I don’t think people realize what it would cost to pay for her agenda, but I’m gonna run through it here. But here is the sound bite.

Question: “We don’t talk about what defense costs. We’re about to hit a trillion dollars in debt because of the corporate tax cuts.” Now, listen to the question. “We’re about to hit a trillion dollars in debt because of the corporate tax cuts, yet when we talk about Pre-K, healthcare, college, suddenly it’s unrealistic because of the cost. And it’s not just bad faith Republicans who make that argument, you hear it from Democrats as well. What is your response to that?” What is your response to people who do not care about the corporate tax cuts and the money that costs, and then being unwilling to spend on social programs?

OCASIO-CORTEZ: They say, “How are you going to pay for it?” as though they haven’t used these same ways to pay for unlimited wars, to pay for trillion dollar tax cuts and tax cut extensions. They use these mechanisms to pay for these things all the time. They only want to know — it just seems like their pockets are only empty when we’re talking about education and investing in human capital in the United States: education, healthcare, housing, and investing in the middle class. All of a sudden, you know there’s nothing left. All of a sudden, the wealthiest nation in the world, we’re just totally scarce. We have complete scarcity when it comes to the things that are most important.

RUSH: Now, what is asinine about this, no, she doesn’t even try to answer the question how is she gonna pay for it. She just complains about the fact that money isn’t being spent on it when it already is! Over 60% of the federal budget is already spent on things this woman claims we’re not spending anything on. The vast majority of our budget is not defense. Anyway, not to mention that we are $20 trillion in debt and don’t have any money, really, except for the money we can print. But she wasn’t through. Here’s the continuation, remainder of her answer.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: I think that — but I also think a lot of these folks, especially those, I think perhaps on the Democratic side, perhaps they don’t even see it, you know? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a generous interpretation or not, but I legitimately think that they start kind of buying into conservative talking points. They get dragged into their court all the time. And I think it is because there’s this really myopic, and also, just misunderstanding of politics as this flat 2-dimensional left-right thing. And so they always feel like, “Okay, the right says this thing. We have to respond to it.” And that’s why they’re winning.

RUSH: Remember what the question was. How are you gonna pay for your agenda? And now she’s trying to deny that she is part of a left-right arrangement, when she’s espousing socialism. Okay. Let’s go through the numbers here very quickly because the time is dwindling. We’re already, with her agenda, $32 trillion over 10 years just for Medicare for all. Now she wants free tuition. She wants free food stamps, free everything. The numbers that have been drawn on her proposals equal $42 trillion over 10 years above what we’re already spending.

Now, let’s talk about how to raise that. What do you think we would have to do? She’s totally clueless. I’ll tell you one thing. You would have to confiscate every dollar of corporate profits over $90,000. Not tax it at 25 or 30. You’d have to confiscate it. Essentially you would need to create a 77% federal tax rate in order to raise money, 77% above $90,000 of income, everything over 90,000 gets taxed at 77%. It’s confiscated. And you’re still way short of what you need.

It isn’t possible, folks. It simply isn’t possible to tax people and businesses and the country enough to get the kind of money to pay for this. But once you confiscate all profits over 90 grand, who’s gonna keep working? You can only do it one time. And you still don’t come up with anywhere near what you need. She’s clueless. She doesn’t understand it, and neither do the people voting for her.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. The numbers have been run. This is what you’ve had to do to pay for the socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for just one year. We’re talking about raising $34 trillion here. If all you wanted to do was tax corporations and people, you’d have to raise $34 trillion by seizing all profits and all family wage income above $90,000, seize it. Not tax it. You would have to confiscate it, and you still wouldn’t have enough.

You seize, allow every corporation to keep $90,000 of profit, and you allow every family to keep $90,000, and you take everything else. How many times could you do that? Corporations are not gonna continue to stay in business if they only keep $90,000 in profit. Same thing with families. Why work if everything is gonna be taken from you?

If you wanted to raise it with a VAT tax like they have in Europe, you know what the VAT tax would be? It’s a national sales tax. Eighty-seven percent. Take the existing American tax base and tax everything they buy, everything they spend money on, from the smallest to the largest, every phase of a purchase, 87% of a stick of gum. Eighty-seven percent of a new lawn mower. Eighty-seven of whatever, that’s the sales tax. Who’s gonna buy anything?

Payroll tax. Okay. Let’s just do it. Let’s raise payroll tax. That’s how we’ll pay for the new socialist agenda. How about a 37% payroll tax on top of your income tax rate and your Medicare tax rate and every other tax that you pay? Who’s gonna keep working after this kind of confiscation takes place? One year, all you could do this.

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