"The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right?"

"I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance. (Although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.... [Despite] the constant effort to portray [AOC] as flaky and ignorant... on the tax issue she’s just saying what good economists say; and she definitely knows more economics than almost everyone in the G.O.P. caucus, not least because she doesn’t 'know' things that aren’t true."

Writes Paul Krugman in "The Economics of Soaking the Rich/What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot" (NYT).

From the comments there: "When top rates were high, 70-80 percent, executive salaries were lower, much lower. Why? Companies saw that if they raised executive salaries they would simply be shoveling most of that extra money to the government. They thought they had better uses for it, such as capital investment and better pay for workers. This is yet another way, an indirect way, in which low top rates encourage economic inequality, the bane of our society, today."