Ocasio-Cortez Says She's More Like a British Socialist, Wants High Taxes on 'the Tippy Tops'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told 60 Minutes in an interview aired Sunday that people should “call me a radical” as “it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country.”

“Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez is pushing for a Green New Deal that would ban use of fossil fuels in the country within 12 years. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?” she said.

Explaining her plan to raise taxes to pay for such initiatives as the climate plan, Ocasio-Cortez told CBS, “You look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000, may be 10 percent or 15 percent, etc. But once you get to, like, the tippy tops — on your 10 millionth dollar — sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all 10 million dollars  are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.”

The congresswoman was asked if she has “Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela” in mind when she espouses socialism.

“Of course not. What we have in mind — and what my policies most closely resemble — what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.

Pressed on how everything gets paid for in applying those systems to America, she said, “With the same exact mechanisms that we pay for military increases for this Space Force.”

The Washington Post recently rated Ocasio-Cortez with four Pinocchios for her Dec. 2 tweet claiming, “$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon. And that’s before our premiums.”

“Oh my goodness,” the freshman lawmaker responded on 60 Minutes. “If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees  I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

“But being factually correct is important,” interviewer Anderson Cooper noted.

“It’s absolutely important. And whenever I make a mistake. I say, ‘OK, this was clumsy,’ and then I restate what my point was,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But it’s not the same thing as  the president lying about immigrants. It’s not the same thing, at all.”