Over the past few months, New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has established herself as a human gaffe machine. Her inability to do simple math, her outlandish ideas based on an alternative reality, her economic ignorance, and lack of common sense has resulted in an almost daily stream of idiocy, inane comments, and ridiculous ideas that have no basis in reality.
As a result, most of our recent political class insanity posts have almost always had an Ocasio-Cortez piece of insanity. Thus, we have decided to separately track her craziness and idiotic takes on economics, business, government, and whatever else on a regular basis under its own set of posts. She deserves to have a separate effort that captures all of the ridiculousness she espouses.
The format we will do is to start with a set of her original inane ideas and just continue to build on that initial list as time goes by. If the list gets too large, which it is likely to do, we will then find a good breaking point to start another list. We will try to source the original source of all of her gaffes, trying to use her own words that were stated either orally or via her Twitter account, a source of endless inane comments and ideas.
We have already listed out eleven major gaffes from her in the following post:
Thus, we start today’s array of missteps with misstep number 12. The original eleven are listed further down the post after the “*************” line.
12- According to Ocasio-Cortez: “I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." So, according to her philosophy of life, it is better to ignore reality than to ignore what you think should be reality.
I have trouble dealing with this type of illogical and inane thinking. You cannot resolve any problem in life without knowing the root cause of that problem. This another way of saying find out what the reality of the situation is and then apply the right solutions to that reality. She would rather ignore reality and live in some sort of fantasy world, a perception of life that will never allow here to resolve any of the problems facing the country and the reality we find ourselves in.
She obviously does not understand the reality of some of her proposed socialist programs: Medicare For All, New Green Deal, free college, free daycare, etc. As we have pointed out many times, the country is about to collapse under the crushing debt and unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. The total of the debt of the Federal and state governments and the unfunded liabilities is well over $100 TRILLION. Since the TOTAL wealth of every American is well under $100 TRILLION, there is simply not enough wealth to fund the financial hole that politicians have already dug for us as a nation.
So why in her mind it might be “morally right” to fund free college, free daycare, Medicare for All etc., the simple reality that she does not understand is that factually there is not enough wealth to fund her morally right programs.
But that is the beauty of existing in a “morally right” alternative like hers. You can get to dream up all of these wonderful ideas, unburdened by reality.
13- One of the more idiotic programs she is proposing is the New Green Deal. This is an impossible program to execute (see her “morally right” obsession above) since it involves transforming the entire country’s energy infrastructure to solar and wind within ten years. She ignores the realities that it took hundreds of years to build the country’s infrastructure up to what it is today, no way that gets replaced in ten years. I say ten years because that is about when she claims the world will end because of manmade climate change unless we listen to her.
Before we conclude why this is such an ignorant statement to make, consider some climate history:
- In 1970, high regarded biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that "all important animal life in the sea will be extinct" in 10 years or so. 49 years later most important animal life is still with us.
- Also in 1970, Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard, George Wald, forecasted that: “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 49 years later we are still hanging around.
- Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, also said that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. 49 years later crop yields are as high as ever and the number of humans starving around has dropped significantly over the past decades.
- Ehrlich followed up on this starvation prediction when he claimed that, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” 49 years later people are still starving but nowhere close to the rate he predicted.
- In 1968 he predicted: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Good thing that he did not lay down that bet since 19 years later England is still hanging around.
- Noted British science writer Nigel Calder warned in a July, 1975 International Wildlife article that, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” So, as recently as about 44 years ago we were all going to die from an Ice Age, not global warming.
- Meteorologist C.C. Wallen claimed in 1975 in a Science News article that, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” But according to other scientists it reversed a few years later when the exact opposite climate trend became popular, global warming.
- In 2000, British climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that in just “a few years” snow would become a “very rare and exciting event” in Britain and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is...Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the next few years, Britain experienced some of its lowest temperatures and snowfall accumulations since records started being kept in 1914. Also, given that most of the U.S. Midwest is suffering through below zero temperatures, 19 years after Viner predicted the death of snow, I do not think they would agree with Viner either.
- Ecologist Kenneth Watt told a college audience in 1970: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” But those predictions never came true.
- In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin wrote in Look magazine: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Not even close 49 years later.
- In 2009, self proclaimed climate expert Al Gore predicted that there was an excellent chance that the North Pole would be melted within five years. Ten years later, the ice cap is still there, generating increment amounts of cold air as witnessed by the American living in the Midwest today.
- Scientist Harrison Brown predicted in 1970 that mankind would run out of copper shortly after the 2000 and that lead, zinc, gold and silver would be gone ten years earlier. 49 years later, these elements are still around and in good supply.
So, famous scientists across many different fields, a Nobel laureate, the head of the Smithsonian,and Al Gore have predicted many catastrophic events related to climate. None of them, not a single one of their predictions came true.
And yet 29 year old, former bartender, non-scientist Ocasio-Cortez wants to upset the entire country’s energy and financial conditions because she predicts the world will end in about a decade. Somehow we should believe her, someone who is not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, someone who does not know the simple definition of unemployment despite having an economics degree, someone who does not know the three branches of government despite being a member of Congress, and someone who denies reality and lives in a fantasy world of what she considers “morally right.” Insane.
14- Some of the published details of her New Green Deal are really too insane to believe. Consider a direct quote from the proposal: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero."
A number of observations:
- She wants to get rid of cows because they fart methane and that destroys the climate. So, while we are destroying our dairy industry, China and India alone are proceeding with building about 2,400 carbon spewing coal plants that will overwhelm the reduction in cow farting that the U.S. manages to do.
- She wants to destroy the airline industry while the rest of the world continues to fly about using their airplanes while in the U.S. we are forced to walk, use a non-existent national train system, or just stay home. Keep in mind that California could not build a single high speed train line despite years and billions of dollars of trying so to think an inept Federal government can do it any better to replace airline travel is a “morally right” fantasy.
- Within ten years she wants to retrofit EVERY building in America, overhaul transportation, and overhaul agriculture. But this is a government that after hundreds of years, still cannot operate a postal system efficiently and effectively. This is a government that after decades still cannot operate a non-high speed train system (Amtrak) efficiently and effectively. To think it can do anything right of any magnitude is crazy.
Look, let’s face a few realities:
- The Federal government is not capable of doing what she wants it to do, not in ten years, not in a hundred years.
- This plan will destroy entire industries, e.g. agriculture and airlines, and not provide a suitable replacement industries….in addition to eliminating cheese, yogurt and milk from our diets once she kills off all of the farting cows.
- To think the rest of the world will follow our example is a total pipe dream, the rest of the world will continue to expand and use coal, oil, airplanes, and cows to expand and improve their economies, the world’s failure to live up to the Paris Climate Agreement proves this point emphatically.
- The devastation caused by moving to purely renewable sources of energy will be devastating to the Earth; wind turbines kill millions of birds every year, more wind turbines will kill billions more, the mining of precious metals for solar cells is a dirty and ecologically devastating process, mining more of those metals, assuming enough of them can be found and mined, will be more devastating.
- The production of batteries to store the renewable energy will also be a disaster for nature and virtually impossible to implement; we have already shown that for California to get to 80% renewable energy it would have to deploy 500 million Tesla Powerwall units to store and supply constant electrical power. To do this for the entire U.S. in ten years would be impossible, would require millions of acres of land which would devastate the ecology of major parts of the country and billions of storage units, and would cost trillions of dollars to produce, deploy and operate.
Alright, enough already. This is an Ocasio-Cortez plan that fails on so many levels in so many ways. But this is what happens when someone lives in a “morally right” fantasy world, the facts and realities listed above do not enter into their thinking. This guarantees that at some point in time reality will jump up and bite her fantasy plans where the sun does not shine, ensuring failure and devastation of our economy, our freedoms, and our safety.
And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.
Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.
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8-Probably most people now know that Amazon has decided not to create a mega headquarters location in Queens, New York and has pulled out of its plans there. If the plan had been executed, 25,000 very high paying jobs would have come to the city which would have resulted in even more jobs in the construction, building materials, retail, restaurant, and other industries that would have serviced the 25,000 high paying employees.
In addition, Amazon was willing to do the following additional niceties to make the deal even better:
- Amazon would invest $2.5 billion in developing the location for their headquarters location.
- This $2.5 billion would result in a load of high paying construction jobs and ancillary jobs and economic benefit to the area, e.g. food trucks to service the construction workers.
- Eventually Amazon would station 25,000 employees at the location, highly paid employees that would buy and renovate housing in the area, eat in local restaurants, go to local movie theaters, buy clothes from local merchants, buy furniture to furnish their new homes, spend money on local transportation, etc.
- Amazon promised to provide computer science course to 130 area high schools.
- Amazon promised to hire at least 30 people from a nearby housing complex to work in its call center.
- Amazon would help fund local infrastructure improvements.
- Amazon would help fund a new 600 seat public school
- Amazon would create a 3.5 acre waterfront park open to the public.
- Amazon would set aside 25,000 square feet for a “community facility use/artist workspace.”
- Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for an art and tech accelerator.
- Amazon would set aside 263,000 square feet for light manufacturing space.
- Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for workforce development and training space.
- Amazon would set up internships for high school students.
- Amazon, starting in 2020, would host semi-annual job fairs and resume workshops at the local housing complex for at least three years.
In return, local New York government entities promised Amazon a $3 billion tax break down the road. We estimated that the local government entities would have reached a breakeven on that $3 billion incentive in less than 8 years and after that, the increased taxes from the Amazon effort would have all been incremental tax revenue.
But leave it to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and several of her other socialist friends, to screw up a great deal for the citizens of New York City. Their constant complaining about the $3 billion finally caused Amazon management to say this effort is not worth hassles.
Even worse, Ocasio-Cortez showed her total ignorance when she said that the $3 billion could be better spent on local infrastructure needs, better schools, better subways, etc. What she failed to understand is that there is no $3 billion pot of money sitting around that was going to be given to Amazon. Amazon would have paid less in taxes to the tune of $3 billion over time. Local city government entities would have gotten a little less in tax money from Amazon initially, the $3 billion does not exist as of today.
Even MSNBC, a news outlet that hates everything Trump and freedom and loves everything Democrat and socialism stepped up to show how ignorant she was: “What’s shocking to me is once again she shows how little she understands not just economics but even unemployment. She’s the one who said the reason unemployment is so low is because a lot of people have two jobs. She needs to learn basic things about what it is to be a representative … Just because she has a progressive agenda, which some people like, does not mean she has the city’s best interest. She showed me she only cares about herself and not about her colleagues ... and not about the people she represents because those people would be getting jobs themselves.”
If MSNBC thinks a Democrat show little understanding about basic concepts and cares only about herself, you know that it is that bad.
9- But being ignorant about the $3 billion, thinking that it is a pot of money that was just going to be handed over to Amazon, was not her only gaffe in this area. Consider this piece of insanity from her: “So I firmly believe that if we want to take that $3 billion dollars that we were willing to give to Amazon and invest it in our local community, we can do that. We can make those jobs. We can make 25,000 jobs. But we don’t have to give away and allow our subway system to crumble so that Amazon essentially owns a part of New York City. We can create 25,000 jobs with Mom-and-Pops.”
So much wrong with this ignorance:
- There is no $3 billion that can be invested in the local community.
- Why would you want to make jobs, when Amazon as willing to hand you 25,000 high paying jobs without any effort on your part?
- I can almost guarantee that the 25,000 jobs that you might be able to make with “Mom and Pops’ would on average pay nowhere near $150,000 a year.
- And again, there is no $3 billion pot of money that she could use to fix a crumbling subway system.
As a result of her stupidity on the subject, her constituents will not see the incredible opportunity that Ocasio-Cortez helped scare away because of her idiocy when it comes to the incentive program, a simple concept that most people would understand with little trouble….except her.
10- Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently arrested a very dangerous MS-13 gang member Ramiro Gutierrez, 26 who allegedly murdered someone in Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional district. According to the Daily Wire: “Gutierrez was arrested by authorities on Monday and charged on Tuesday with second-degree murder, gang assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. The victim has been identified as Abel Mosso, a 20-year-old reported member of the 18th Street Gang, a rival gang of MS-13. The brutal video shows a group of men wrestling on the ground. The shooter, allegedly Gutierrez, then unloads six shots, reportedly at the victim’s face. As chaos ensues from horrified passersby, the suspect flees the scene, leaving his victim’s lifeless body.”
Gutierrez had been arrested 12 prior times and was free on bail on an attempted murder charge. Nice guy. One would have thought that the Congressional member representing that district would have had some sympathy for someone murdered in her district. Instead, she showed her lack of caring by not attacking the murderer but by attacking the government’s immigration officers: “This is one of the most urgent moral issues and crises that we have in America right now. This is not a political issue. Children dying in detention centers should not be a partisan concern. It should be a universal concern for every American in the United States. ICE operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States. We’re here to say that an agency like ICE, which repeatedly and systematically violates human rights, does not deserve a dime.”
So many issues with this stupidity:
- ICE is accountable to the laws of the country, it is not operating like some sort of Gestapo agency.
- My “friends and neighbors” are law abiding U.S. citizens, not illegal immigrants, a group that includes violent MS-13 gang members, violent drug cartel agents, human traffickers, and ordinary criminals.
- Obviously, Ocasio-Cortez thinks that this latter group of people are her friends and neighbors, people who came here illegally, many of whom intend to do some nasty things to Americans once here.
- And “children dying in detention centers” is a incredibly inflammatory and wrong-headed thing to say; to my knowledge no child has died when in ICE custody and shame on her for implying that many illegal immigrant kids have died.
- Much like she does not care who gets murdered in her district by illegal criminal elements, she obviously does not care about the thousands of U.S. kids that are killed, abused, and attacked every year in this country.
She is just another one of the new brand of Democrats in this country that care more about foreigners than U.S. citizens, espousing lies to make that point.
11- And finally for today, it looks like it not take her long to get into the swing of unethical behavior in Washington:
- She could be in violation of the House ethics rules.
- Ocasio-Cortez received campaign served and support from a millionaire donor.
- But the campaign could not afford his services and rather than having the campaign take out a loan, she likely paid the donor directly out of her pocket.
- In turn, the donor then hired Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend which means that the donor was getting paid directly by the Congresswoman while at the same time paying her boyfriend, a little nepotism.
- This could be interpreted as donating indirectly to her campaign.
- Ocasio-Cortez subsequently hired the donor to be her chief of staff, possibly rewarding him for hiring her boyfriend.
- When it then became apparent that she had hired her boyfriend to be on her staff, she tried to deny that reality out of existence.
- All of this from a Congressional candidate that raged against this type of nepotism and cronyism.
More insanity from Ocasio-Cortez: too ignorant to understand tax incentives and rebates which has cost her Congressional district billions and billions of dollars in benefits, turning her back on 25,000 highly paid taxpayers, lying about our brave immigration officers, caring more about illegal immigrants than U.S. citizens, and hypocritically raging against nepotism while wasting no time to be what she claimed to despise.
And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.
Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.
1- Despite supposedly having an economics degree, she made an initial fool of herself when she claimed that the reason the unemployment rate was so low was because so many Americans had to work more than one job to get by. Any halfway smart high school economics class student could probably tell her that the unemployment rate calculation does not care how many jobs a person is working, just whether or not they are working. And yet this college graduate had no idea.
2- She compounded this lack of knowledge on the unemployment rate by claiming that the number of people in this country holding multiple jobs was large and growing. However, a simple check of government statistics would show her that the number of people holding multiple jobs is actually quite small and shrinking, the exact opposite of what she claimed. Thus, she was either lying or making up a reality not based on actual data.
3- Despite being an elected member of Congress, she erroneously claimed that the structure of our government process included three branches: the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Pretty sure that the Supreme Court justices were surprised to find out that they were no longer a branch of the government.
4- A financial audit of the Pentagon found that over a twenty year period, about $21 TRILLION in budget dollars was mishandled, misclassified, or not accounted for properly. Rather than understand the audit, she immediately and incorrectly assumed that the Pentagon had misspent and wastefully spent $21 TRILLION.
However, if she had done a simple math and logic calculation based on history and actual data, she would have found out that the ENTIRE Pentagon budget over that twenty year period was only about $12 TRILLION, making it impossible to waste $21 TRILLION when the budget was about 40% less than that. This idiocy earned the highest level of lying from the Washington Post, the dreaded four Pinocchios: ”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.”
5- As a socialist and/or communist, Ocasio-Cortez wants to impose massive socialism/communism programs on the country. One of her favorite pipe dreams is the so-called “Medicare For All” program that would put people like her and the Federal government in charge of every aspect of every American’s health care. A generally accepted cost estimate for this disaster is $32 TRILLION over the first ten years or about $3.2 TRILLION a year. She proposed funding this program by raising the marginal tax rate to a whopping 70% on every dollar over $10 million that any American earned.
However, a simple calculation using public IRS data easily shows that such a plan would raise only about $50 billion a year at most, or about only 1.5% of the amount needed for the Medicare for All program. Thus, she has really, really bad math skills (highly likely given the gaffes we discussed above), she is lazy and did not do this simple calculation, or she is a liar, claiming that the rich would fund the entire program.
6- Prior to being sworn in to Congress but after being elected, she railed against Congressional members for still drawing a salary even though 800,000 Federal employees were not being paid during the government shutdown. However, once elected, she refused to not draw a salary, ducking press questions about her massive hypocrisy on the matter of berating those that took a salary in December but refusing to not draw a salary after she was sworn in in late January.
7- In a Twitter spat she had with a healthcare expert, she put forth the following tweet: ““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.”
As always, she is talking about a subject she knows nothing about and has not done the research for. For starters, anyone with an ObamaCare insurance policy has to have critical procedures and medicine covered. Second, According to the National Conference of State Legislatures: “There are more than 1,900 such statutes [statutes that guarantee medical coverage/treatment] among all 50 states; another analysis tallies more than 2,200 individual statute provisions, adopted over a 30+ year period.”
Do we have a health care issue and overall health insurance issue in this country? We certainly do, for a minority of citizens, but there is nothing close to being a set of death panels in this country being operated by greedy corporations, there are loads of safeguards to prevent death panels, safeguards that obviously do not exist in her world or mind.
Okay seven major faux pas and she has only be in office for about a month. Unfortunately, we have a whole folder of other bouts of idiocy and bad math that we will present over the coming weeks and months.
And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.
Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
