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Former Trump administration official Steve Bannon raised eyebrows Friday by calling for President-elect Donald Trump to spike taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Speaking with Semafor, Bannon claimed that corporations in particular haven’t been investing enough of their own money in building “jobs and robust communities” — which, FYI, is a leftist talking point.

“Of the four and half trillion dollars in revenue we get, how much is from corporate taxes?” he said. “Only $500 billion. Since 2008, $200 billion has gone into stock repurchases. If that had gone into plants and equipment, think what that would have done for the country.”

And so, since the money hasn’t gone toward “plants and equipment,” these entities need to be taxed to the brim, he argued.

“I’m for a dramatic increase in corporate taxes,” Bannon continued. “We have to increase taxes on the wealthy. For getting our guys’ [the working class] taxes cut, we’ve got to cut spending, which they’re gonna resist. Where does the tax revenue come from? Corporations and the wealthy. ”

“And when they start squealing, we have a conversation. We’re all partners in this, everybody’s going to take a little pain, but the working people are going to take less pain than you guys,” he added.

While some social media users agreed with Bannon, many were quick to call him out for falling prey to leftist thinking. All higher corporate taxes would do, they argued, is incentivize corporations to either take their operations overseas or hike the prices of the goods they sell.

Look at some of the criticisms below:

Higher taxes were just one of several “populist” ideas that he unveiled during the wide-ranging interview. He also called for “taking on tech, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, and driving the benefits to working people, to the middle class.”

“Whether it’s trade policies that are populist in nature — bringing high-skilled manufacturing jobs back — whether it’s immigration and shutting down the border, because you’re trying to stop the competition from unskilled workers, the one thing in our movement that I think is different than some of the populism that you see, you know, in other places [is] that we are populist nationalists,” he said.

Like many Democrats, Bannon also called for politicians to listen and cater to the lunatics who’ve been worshipping murderer Luigi Mangione.

“There’s not that much difference between Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer at the end of the day,” he said. “Fundamentally, they are systems players. They understand that if the underlying anger out there isn’t put down, they’re going to be gone. This is why our coalition is broader. It’s also why you see this seething anger about this healthcare CEO being assassinated on the street in New York.”

“A guy that lies in wait, steps out, and shoots a guy at point blank range — pure evil — and that’s as anti-American as you can get. That’s Robert Ford. When terribly misguided people say this guy is a hero, you can’t look away from that. The response to that is not more security for CEOs. It’s looking at how much, since 2008, has gone to stock buybacks for shareholders, not to reinvest in plants and equipment and capital to build jobs and robust communities. The country is a bad way right now,” he added.

Vivek Saxena
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