The Endless Ignorance of AOC
Let’s be honest. Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is charismatic. At the same time, she’s profoundly, astonishingly unintelligent.
A dangerous combination.
She studied economics at Boston University, yet doesn’t grasp the most basic principles of how things work.
Take New York’s Amazon HQ deal that she single-handedly killed earlier this year. Nationally, 238 cities put together incentive packages, hoping to attract the company’s second headquarters with its high-paying jobs.
New York City and Crystal City, VA. were the lucky winners. New York alone was to be home to 25,000 highly skilled and lucrative jobs.
But this misguided socialist was outraged over the $3 billion tax breaks and incentives package that the governor and mayor of New York had assembled to snag Amazon. She and other radical leftists squawked until Amazon pulled out of New York and opted to put its entire HQ2 in Virginia.
In her campaign to keep those jobs out of New York, this congresswoman accused Amazon of paying “starvation wages,” completely unaware that the company pays a base pay rate of $15 and hour and had pledged that jobs at its second headquarters would average $150K a year.
Smugly congratulating herself for queering the deal, AOC boasted that the city could now spend the $3 billion subsidy that was earmarked for Amazon on more worthy things like teachers, subways and better jobs.
Except that $3 billion was coming from tax breaks. There isn’t a pile of loot for schools and subways. This economics major didn’t know the difference between tax incentives and cash incentives.
Scary.
Then, when news broke last week that Amazon plans to open a far smaller operation in New York, she smugly congratulated herself.
“Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway - ‘without’ requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways,” she Tweeted.
Stirring up class warfare while spreading misinformation. Her speciality. .
Fact is, Amazon went from planning 25,000 jobs in AOC’s district to 1,500 Amazon jobs outside of her district. Yet she saw this as a win for the working man. Voters should toss her out this fall when they have the chance.
Speaking of AOC’s dissembling.
When the Trump administration announced last week that there would be slight changes to policies governing the food stamp program, it was catnip to AOC, who either hadn’t read the details or deliberately ignored them to pursue a narrative of an unfeeling administration trying to hurt families.
“My family relied on food stamps (EBT) when my dad died at 48. I was a student. If this happened then, we might've just starved,” she Tweeted last week.
Geezus. If only she’d do some critical thinking between wardrobe changes and dance moves.
What the administration did was make a small change in eligibility. One that - had she read the details - wouldn’t have affected her family. Or any family with kids.
“Under current rules, able-bodied adults without children can receive food stamps for up to three months once every three years,” explained Reason magazine. “but states have the authority to waive that limitation and grant full access in counties where the unemployment rate is higher than a mere 2.5 percent.
“Under the new rules, states will be able to grant waivers only in counties with an unemployment rate over 6 percent or higher.”
Making it more difficult for able-bodied adults without dependents to get handouts would seem reasonable to most normal people.
Not to socialists, of course.
Instead of offering rational arguments against the policy change, however, AOC spread emotional claptrap and misled the public.
She’s either not very smart. Or she’s fundamentally dishonest.
I’m going with the former.
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