Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants Carbon Tax, Trillions in Spending for ‘Renewable Energy Economy’

Democratic-socialist and congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that she wants a carbon tax and trillions in government spending to transform the U.S. economy.

Appearing as a guest on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with host Trevor Noah, the political upshot proposed cutting military spending while boosting taxes on high-income Americans to create a “renewable energy economy.”

 

“I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week, I can’t believe I can say that, it’s really weird, but one of the things that we saw is if people pay their fair share if corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” Ocasio-Cortez boasted before delving into her proposal. “For example, as Warren Buffett likes to say if he pays as much as his secretary paid, 15 percent tax rate, if corporations paid, if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there.”

“One of the wide estimates is that it’s going to take $3 trillion to $4 trillion to transition us to 100 percent renewable economy,” the 28-year-old added.

Ocasio-Cortez, whose progressive agenda to transition to “Green New Deal” by 2035, is proposing a carbon tax on top of trillions in spending. “So we’ve got $2 trillion from folks paying their fair share, which they weren’t paying before the Trump tax bill,” the congressional candidate said. “They weren’t paying that before the Trump tax bill. If we get people to pay their fair share, that’s $2 trillion in 10 years. Now if we implement a carbon tax on top of that so that we can transition and financially incentivize people away from fossil fuels, if we implement a carbon tax, that’s an additional amount, a large amount of revenue that we can have.”

The progressive also suggested a “re-prioritization” of government spending by slashing the U.S. military budget. “Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “They’re like, ‘We don’t want another fighter jet!’ They’re like, ‘Don’t give us another nuclear bomb,’ you know?”

In a recent interview with radio host Bill Press, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez championed Ocasio-Cortez as “the future of our party.” The Bronx native-turned-Westchester “it girl,” is a dues-paying member of Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter, which recently called for the abolishment of profit and prisons.

As Breitbart News previously reported, “The candidate has not endorsed or disavowed on those far-left goals, but her campaign platform does call for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), establishing universal guaranteed employment, and single-payer healthcare — i.e., “Medicare for all.””