Dan Riffle, the new policy adviser for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is revving up the engines with an anti-billionaire blast on Twitter — starting with Bill Gates.
Gates may be a good person, but he’s a “policy failure” and having so much dough is not “morally appropriate,” according to Riffle, who goes by the Twitter handle “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.”
Riffle, a lawyer, onetime marijuana lobbyist and, according to Mediaite, a former communications director for ex-Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, also called the curbing of excessive wealth a “moral” mandate.
“Bill Gates’ money hoarding makes him greedy, but maybe he goes 6/6 on the other deadly sins and, on balance, is a good person,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Still, he’s a policy failure. The acquisition of that much wealth has bad consequences. A moral society needs guardrails against it.”
In another tweet, Riffle said his goal for 2019 is for someone to ask Democratic primary candidates whether it is “morally appropriate for anyone to be a billionaire.”
“Ta-Nahesi [Coates] just asked @aoc that question on stage at #MLKNow so we’re getting somewhere. She said it isn’t btw,” he said.
Riffle earlier this month gleefully took at least some of the credit for Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal income tax rate on the highest-earning Americans.
When Politico initially tweeted about Ocasio-Cortez’s only-for-the-richest income tax hike, he replied: “Sorry everyone, my bad. I’ll talk her up to 90,” Mediaite reported.
He subsequently deleted the post, despite getting encouragement from his boss, the news site reported.
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