Susan Wright on the Right
So, recently I wrote a piece about the flash-in-the-pan New York flake with all the intellectual heft of a Pez dispenser, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I referred to her as “Freebie Barbie,” a term that has her fan club writhing and spitting in outrage.
I don’t care.
The last piece involved her cowardly response to the offer of a debate from columnist, Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro was responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that Republicans wouldn’t debate her on the issues. He offered, and since he’s not a candidate, but simply one of the Republicans she claimed would not debate her, sweetened the deal by offering $10,000 to her campaign or her favorite charity.
Frightened out of her wits (a loss she is in no position to afford), she retreated behind her Victorian walls, comparing Shapiro’s offer to “catcalling.”
While the aforementioned fan club are willing to buy that nonsense, those of us who aren’t looking for the government to pick up a $42 trillion tab to give us “free” stuff see it for the cop out that it was.
Ocasio-Cortez was, unfortunately, foisted into the public eye by a surprise primary win over the incumbent Democrat in New York’s 14th District.
She is a member of the Democratic Socialists, and in her faulty, unthinking belief, the government is big enough to give us everything we want.
That’s why the dismissive nickname, “Freebie Barbie,” by the way. Somebody that wants the government to have that much power over us is not to be taken seriously – anymore than those who would admire such a vapid person.
She makes appearances and has an awful time answering basic questions. The more she babbles, the more it sinks in that if she wasn’t promising free stuff, there’d be no way anyone could listen to her without getting a small brain bleed.
She doesn’t make any sense.
On Friday, The Washington Post, responding to requests from readers, decided to take some of Ocasio-Cortez’s claims and put them through the fact checking process.
Does she have a real plan, or is she as mindless and ditzy as she sounds?
For instance, in an appearance on CNN on Monday, when challenged on the costs of government-financed health care, she answered: “Why aren’t we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can’t afford access to health care? That is part of the cost of our system.”
Does anybody know what that means?
You have to consider that fact checking all of her would be a daunting task. When you lack even basic economic knowledge, double down on with completely wrong ideas, and then shotgun it out to the public, you enter into the territory that makes fact checkers hate their job.
Maybe that’s the point.
The conclusion the WaPo fact checkers came to, regarding Ocasio-Cortez, is that pretty much every assertion made was wrong.
Let’s start here:
“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
— interview on PBS’s “Firing Line,” July 13, 2018
Ok. This isn’t happening. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s not “everyone” working two jobs. The number of those with more than one job has been in decline since the Great Recession, and has held at somewhere around 5 percent since 2010. There have been some slight bounces from 2017 to July of this year, but not nearly enough to cover that sweeping nonsense spewed by Ocasio-Cortez.
So what’s going on with those who do have two jobs?
The July data shows most of these people juggling two jobs — 58 percent — have a primary job and a part-time job. Only 6 percent have two full-time jobs, which calls into question her claim that people are working “60, 70, 80 hours a week.” Indeed, the average hours worked per week for private employees has remained steady at just under 35 hours for years.
You have to wonder if had somebody to consult with before making that ludicrous claim, or is she just out there winging it?
Her claims about ICE are pretty special.
“ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.”
— in an interview with the Intercepted podcast, May 30
Required?
Nothing about that sounds right. It may be because it’s not right. It’s just another stab in the dark at sounding smart.
Another fail.
As our friends at PolitiFact documented, this is an urban legend. There is language in the 2016 appropriations bill that requires ICE to have 34,000 beds available — ICE “shall maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds through September 30, 2016” — but it is not required to fill them. The main point of such language, a version of which dated to 2009, is to make sure the money is not spent on something else.
Beds available is not the same thing as saying they’re required to detain 34,000 people to fill those beds. She’s out of her mind.
The language regarding the number of beds was eliminated in the most recent appropriations bills.
Another of Ocasio-Cortez’s fevered claims is that there is no more upper-middle class in the United States.
“They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
— interview on “Pod Save America,” Aug. 7
This was She Guevara’s attempt to take a jab at the boring, old “regular” Democrats. And once again, she’s just wrong.
But the data show that while the middle class overall may have shrunk a bit, the upper-middle class has actually grown. In a 2016 paper published by the Urban Institute, Stephen J. Rose documented that the upper-middle class has grown substantially, from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014. His analysis showed that there was a massive shift in the center of gravity of the economy, with an increasing share of income going to the upper-middle class and rich.
“In 1979, the middle class controlled a bit more than 46 percent of all incomes, and the upper-middle class and rich controlled 30 percent,” Rose wrote. “In contrast, in 2014 the rich and upper-middle class controlled 63 percent of all incomes (52 percent for the upper-middle class and 11 percent for the rich); the middle class share had shrunk to 26 percent; and the shares of the lower-middle class, poor, and near-poor had declined by half.”
And how about “Medicare for all”?
She rode her unicorn onto CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” set on August 8, claiming Medicare for all would be less costly than the current system.
She says a study funded by the Koch brothers backed up her claims, but not quite.
A study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (which receives some funding from the Koch Foundation) assessed a plan put forth by Ocasio-Cortez’s mentor, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Sanders’ plan would have cut payments to healthcare providers by 40 percent. In doing so, it would cut overall health expenditures by about $2 trillion from 2022 to 2031.
We’ll shelve the discussion that goes into what happens to the quality of care when you slash the funds of healthcare providers and then flood the system with all the people who will be crowding into emergency rooms and urgent care centers daily for everything from a cold to a splinter in their finger.
Never, ever take recommendations from socialists on healthcare.
But the study makes clear that this is an unrealistic assumption and in fact the plan would raise government expenditures by $32.6 trillion over 10 years. Without the provider cuts, the additional federal budget cost would be nearly $40 trillion. So, no matter how you slice it, the study does not say it would be “much cheaper” than the current system.
Are you saying she’s wrong again?
Yup.
In that same appearance, she further addressed the Affordable Care Act… aka… “Obamacare.”
“The reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that everyday American make is a tax. And so, while it may not seem like we pay that tax on April 15th, we pay it every single month or we do pay at tax season if we don’t buy, you know, these plans off of the exchange.”
— interview on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Aug. 8
She doesn’t get policy.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote the opinion in what was the 5-4 Supreme Court decision on the ACA, saying that while it was an exercise of the government’s taxing power, he was referring to the individual mandate, as well as the penalty paid at tax time for failure to sign up for insurance.
“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,” Roberts wrote. “Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”
The conclusion of this fact checking adventure is painfully clear. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has managed to get pretty much every major point she’s pushed wrong.
Let’s face it. In the age of Trump, we’ve gotten used to clownish, novelty, know-nothing political candidates. They babble on, incessantly, directionless, because they have no clue, but the spotlight means too much to them.
With Ocasio-Cortez, just as it was with Trump, however, the fault doesn’t simply lie with her.
The bulk of the blame for having somebody so nescient so close to political power rests with those dense enough to approve of the act.
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