Brutal: Examining Ocasio-Cortez’s Painful Answer on Funding Her Socialist Utopia

As we flagged on Friday, media sensation and instant lefty icon Alexandria Ocasio Cortez appeared on the Daily Show last week, where she was confronted with a relatively simple question by host Trevor Noah. Ocasio Cortez is campaigning on a laundry list of new government programs and entitlements, including “Medicare for All,” free college, and a “universal jobs guarantee.” But how does she intend to pay for for this calorie-exploding buffet of government largesse? Her response to that fundamental challenge was a bit of a jumbled mess, to put it rather mildly:

After muttering some words about “back of the envelope” calculations and touting a discussion with a Nobel Prize-winning economist, she exclaimed that if wealthy people and corporations would just pay their “fair share,” her dreams could become realities. What was remarkable about her answer was not that she deployed standard-issue Democratic talking points invoking Warren Buffett’s secretary; you could abruptly wake virtually any left-of-center political figure from a deep sleep and quiz them about long term federal debt, and he or she would groggily start mumbling and “fairness.” No, what was most interesting about AOC’s reply was how simultaneously honest and incoherent it was. She proposes “reversing” the tax reform law, which would result in a $2 trillion tax increase on families and businesses. The economy is booming in large measure because job creators have finally been afforded precious certainty, and because America’s grossly uncompetitive corporate tax rates were made much more competitive. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are feeling better about their economic conditions because they have more disposable income, thanks to an across-the-board lowering of the federal tax burden, across all income groups. AOC wants to undo that progress and apply the additional revenue toward government programs.

. . .

Ocasio Cortez’s idea is to reduce spending on the military…in order to vastly expand already-troubled healthcare and retirement programs. The math doesn’t even come close to adding up. Defenders of Cortez’s socialist vision have responded to these inconvenient realities by contending that other western nations manage to pull of government-run healthcare, so we make it work — or by flatly stating that specifics aside, we’ll somehow find a way to finance the scheme:

(Read more from “Brutal: Examining Ocasio-Cortez’s Painful Answer on Funding Her Socialist Utopia” HERE)

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