On January 24, in New York Magazine, Eric Levitz wrote an essay defending AOC’s proposed 70% marginal tax rate plan, drawing a direct line between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax plan and Thomas Jefferson. It was a very odd essay, to be honest. Levitz was only able to draw upon one letter which Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1785 as proof of this connection; a letter in which Jefferson expressed righteous indignation at the wide chasm that existed between the peasants and aristocrats of France under the ancienne regime and in which Jefferson proposed, as a solution, the equal distribution of property to all children in a family, since the inequality which he saw was not only intolerable but made it impossible for republican government to exist. In this way, Levitz argued that Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% marginal plan tapped “one deeply rooted strain of American thought on economic morality.” Levitz is not the first one to do this, either. Jeff...(Read Full Article)