Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Insanity, Part 1: Not Knowing Simple Economics, Not Knowing Simple Civics, Not Knowing Simple Math and More

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.

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 Obama Care 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.

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