December,2018, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: The Human Gaffe Machine That Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly elected Congresswoman from NYC is now officially our favorite and most prolific politician when it comes to saying just the dumbest things possible. It is so hard to understand that a person like her will be developing and voting on legislation that will affect every American when even the simplest concepts of economics, budget, history, and government continually elude her depth of understanding. To see a complete listing of her inane comments and beliefs put her name in the search box above.

And just when you thought her ignorance could not get any worse, she puts her foot in her mouth again:

• We have already talked about one of her favorite topics of ignorance, the so-called “Medicare for All:concept that would effectively add $3.2 TRILLION to the national debt in just the first ten years,would require at least a doubling of taxes for every American every year, and would like crash the whole economy while providing worse medical for every American.
• Given that context, she recently tripped over a Pentagon number that showed $21 TRILLION of Pentagon budget dollars could not be accounted for over the past 20 years: “$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.: "$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for ALL costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for ALL could have been funded already by the Pentagon. And that’s before our premiums.”
• It is no surprise that the Pentagon has a massive accounting and audit problem, we have covered that disgrace many times over the years in this blog.
• But if you go to the following website, you will see that the Pentagon’s annual budget over the past 20 years has probably been about $600 billion a year, sometimes more, sometimes less:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spending-from-2000-to-2012/

• Which means that the Pentagon has spent about $12 TRILLION over the past twenty years or so.
• Given this $12 TRILLION reality, how could the Pentagon have lost $21 TRILLION over the same period like she asserted so confidently?
• The reality is that you cannot lose more money than you never had especially when the reality of what you had and what she said was lost is so far apart, roughly $9 TRILLION.
• The report she totally misunderstood did say that $21 TRILLION was not accounted for but that does not mean it was lost. Let the American Liberty website explain what the study really meant: “Over the course of 20 some odd years, the Pentagon did have a ton of accounting errors. The total of those errors did reach $21 trillion. That in no way means that the Pentagon misplaced any money at all. Instead, when money goes between departments, it is tracked. Sometimes there are rounding errors. Sometimes there are honest mistakes. Sometimes the same dollar can bounce between departments over a thousand times in a year.”
• And yet, rather than understand the accounting and underlying analysis, she just flew off the handle and falsely assumed that if only the Pentagon ran a tighter ship $21 TRILLION would miraculously show up to fund her idiotic “Medicare for All” concept.
• And even if there were $21 TRILLION to be had, she still did the math wrong: the $21 TRILLION was over a 20 year period, while the $32 TRILLION cost for the “Medicare for All” concept was over ten years so that 66% percent number is grossly wrong, it would be closer to 33% when corrected for twenty years of errors vs. tens years of cost.
• Which is a mute point since there is no missing $21 TRILLION but it does again illustrate her math ignorance.I could again try to explain how scary it is that a woman like this is deciding on legislation. But let’s go back to the American Liberty website and see if they can explain how bad ignorance like this is in Washington DC: “If this was a single mistake by Cortez, we might be able to let it slide. Who hasn’t put their foot in their mouth during a late-night tweet? The problem is that this was an average Tuesday for her. She’s honestly this stupid — all the time. What’s worse is that she was elected. In a landslide! This is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they created the Electoral College. The people of New York’s 14th district clearly aren’t intelligent enough to be trusted with a vote. She’s here. She’s going to be sworn in as a member of our Congress in just a few weeks time. She will have the authority to pen laws. If that doesn’t disturb you then you are probably numb beyond reach.”

Well said, well said.

2) In case anyone thinks we are picking on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unfairly, that we are conservative nut cases that are lying or exaggerating her ignorance, let’s see what the left leaning, Democratic living Washington Post had to say about her above assertion:

• Recall what are tweeted assertion was: “$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained.’ $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon,” she tweeted on December 2.
• Washington Post’s official fact checker, Glenn Kessler, checked out her assertion.
• According to the Unfiltered Patriot website, Kessler "traced Ocasio-Cortez’s claim back to a Nation article in which Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore shows that there were $21 trillion in accounting adjustments at the Pentagon between 1998 and 2015 that could not be tied to any supporting documentation. In other words, there are no specific transactions in the records that can account for this money.”
• Or as Philip Klein observed in the Washington Times, “the same [Pentagon] dollar could have been accounted for many times.”
• Kessler though that her reasoning and assertion was so bad that he gave her the worst rating for a lie/statement/assertion, the dreaded “Four Pinocchios,” basically saying she was “Liar, liar pants on fire: ”Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report. But it’s unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread. She cited the $21 trillion figure and said ‘66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.’ That’s a direct comparison. It’s badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion. So we will award Four Pinocchios to Ocasio-Cortez.”

Given her short but rich track history of ignorance, how many more “Four Pinocchios” do we think she will earn over the next two years, given she already has one in the books and has not even been sown into Congress?

3) Today is obviously Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bashing day since the Heritage Foundation recently got in on the action to show how her views and statements are so out of touch with reality, as discussed in a recent article for the Heritage Foundation by Justin Haskins:

• Apparently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently got into a Twitter snit with Jim Hanson, the president of the Security Studies Group, when Hanson commented that under government-managed health care, “Democrat Socialist overlords” would decide “who will live and who will die,” adding “#DeathPanels rock” at the end of his message."
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a “Medicare for All” groupie, responded that, “Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies + boards saying you’re on your own bc they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine. Maybe if the GOP stopped hiding behind this “socialist” rock they love to throw, they’d actually engage on-issue for once.”
• Big talk for someone who is not even sworn in yet to Congress ….and false talk.
• First off, Obama Care forces private insurance companies to cover “essential health” treatments which sounds awfully contrary to private insurance company death panels.
• Plus, state regulators make “essential health mandates” required in their own states.
• According to the National Conference of State Legislatures: “There are more than 1,900 such statutes among all 50 states; another analysis tallies more than 2,200 individual statute provisions, adopted over a 30+ year period.”
• Mr. Haskins correctly notes that “It’s simply not true that there are all sorts of serious health problems health insurers don’t cover, which is clearly what Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting in her Twitter post.”
• Furthermore, “Second, the “death panels” she described aren’t death panels at all. Death panels are composed of government bureaucrats or policymakers who decide which health care treatments will be covered in a single-payer or government-run health care system. The reason they have been labeled “death panels” is because under many single-payer proposals, the government is the only insurer, which means it has complete power to decide which services will be covered. There are no other options in a single-payer system—either the government will choose to pay for your care, or it won’t. And if it chooses not to, then you’re out of luck—unless, of course, you’re a millionaire like Sanders.”
• As always, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez misses the obvious reality in that Obama Care, halfway to “Medicare For All” in some respects has resulted in individual health insurance premiums doubling since its inception and deductibles are now so high for these Obama Care policies that that out of pocket costs, for the cheapest family based Obama Care policy, is a whopping $14,000. 

Higher and higher premiums and higher and higher deductibles, which would likely result from a “Medicare For All” plan, is the true death panels that could doom the health care in this country, not private insurance companies that operate in a free market economy. If your premiums and deductibles get so high that you cannot afford insurance like Obama Care policies, that certainly is a death panel by a different name but still a death panel. 

Thus, as always, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is clueless on another issue that she knows nothing about but yet has enough false bravado to talk like she does to challenge experts and reality.

More insanity to follow….insanity that is likely to include the latest idiocy from our new favorite gaffe machine.

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