The plague bacillus of crackpot socialism has infected the Democratic Party.
The vector of transmission is the former barmaid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist who will represent New York’s 14th District.
More than three dozen of Ocasio-Cortez’s colleagues are supporting her plan for a $40 trillion New Green Deal, arguably the daffiest idea to hit Capitol Hill since socialist President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal scammed the people into marching toward collectivism.
So the Democrats would lurch farther toward the iron totalitarianism envisaged by Cortez’s socialist mentor Senator Bernie Sanders, an apologist for communist murderers.
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No Details, and Loads of Money
The apostle of Sanders learned well. Propose free money. Stay vague on how to pay for it.
“Democrats are increasingly lining up to support a ‘Green New Deal,’ which, while vague on details,” the Daily Caller reported, “could end up being the largest expansion of government in decades.”
The Daily Caller reported that more than 40 Democrats support the dopey idea, which they believe, will “fight global warming and bring about … economic, social and racial justice.’”
Reported the Daily Caller:
Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” calls for creating a House committee to draft legislation to fight global warming and turn the U.S. economy into something akin to what Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders envisions. Indeed, the “Green New Deal” could be a preview of what policies the Democratic Party will back in the 2020 elections.
“This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a panel event in early December alongside Sanders, a likely 2020 presidential contender.
Those goals include moving the U.S. to 100 percent green energy, federal job guarantees for workings forced out of their fossil fuel jobs, guaranteed minimum income and universal health care.
Asked about the details, Ocasio-Cortez argues from authority. She claims that success is “inevitable:
As a matter of fact, it’s not just possible that we will create jobs and economic activity by transitioning to renewable energy, but it’s inevitable that we are going to create jobs. “It’s inevitable that we are going to create industry.
Details were not forthcoming.
Indeed, when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked her about the cost of her plan, and where she and her socialist pals would get $$0 trillion, she answered with gibberish.
It Won’t Work
Some details have come from think-tanks, including those on the Left.
As well, the Daily Caller reported, “moving the U.S. to a 100-percent renewable electric grid could cost as much as $5.2 trillion over two decades, according to a 2010 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That’s about $218 billion to move the grid away from coal and natural gas.”
The rest of her nutty ideas, including universal health care and guaranteed income, The Daily Caller reported, is even worse. Medicare for All, a crackpot idea from Sanders, will cost $32.6 trillion through the next decade, the libertarian Mercatus Center reported, while “hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio estimated the cost to taxpayers of a universal basic income policy would top $3.8 trillion a year — and that’s assuming every American citizen got just $12,000 a year.”
Even the leftist Urban Institute agrees that the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez socialist medicine plan will cost upwards of $40 trillion.
As well, noted the Daily Caller:
For comparison, the Great Society policies pursued by the Johnson administration during the 1960s cost $22 trillion, according to estimates from the Heritage Foundation. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” of the 1930s during the Great Depression cost $500 billion in today’s dollars, The Nation reported in 2008.
Of course, both the New Deal and Great Society have left U.S. taxpayers on the hook for trillions in debt and unfunded liabilities — somewhere between $87 trillion and $222 trillion.
Ocasio-Cortez’s Grasp of Economics
That Ocasio-Cortez advocates such a plan is unsurprising. She’s a virtual illiterate without the most basic understanding of economics or public policy.
For instance, she once speculated, to richly-deserved ridicule, that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.”
For instance, she does not understand that a restaurant where she toiled closed its doors because of the minimum-wage hike to $15 per hour she supports, and once said that the national parks were an example of “democratic socialism” at work, a falsehood on par with her claim that holding two jobs knocks down the unemployment rate.
Part of the The New Green Deal is “free college tuition,” presumably because professors and college personnel don’t expect to be paid.
