One of the problems with electing a 28-year-old as your next representative is that 28-year-olds don’t know very much, and when they swallow the nutty nostrums of democratic socialism, it tends to prove they know even less than most other 28-year-olds.
So it is with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will represent New York’s 14th District in Congress next session.
She simply doesn’t know very much and proves it every time she tweets on Twitter. Every time the woman tweets, one can expect a cascade of idiocy if not hypocrisy.
Ocasio-Cortez Denounces Uber, but Uses Uber
For the latest episode of the Young Democratic Socialist Who Really Likes to Tweet, we have the dispatch from Fox News that Ocasio-Cortez is a big fan of Uber, the private car service that provides rides when contacted via a website or smartphone application.
As Fox reported, between “April and late June, the Ocasio-Cortez campaign recorded spending nearly $4,000 on Uber for what appears to be 160 rides by its staff, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records reveal.”
The payments to Uber ranged from just 59 cents to $82.26 and were filed under “car service.” All the rides were taken in California. There’s no data yet for the months of July and August.
In her home state of New York, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign doesn’t use the traditional yellow cabs for getting around either.
The FEC records show that the campaign spent nearly $2,500 for more than 90 rides with the so-called ride-sharing startup company Juno that pitched itself as an alternative to Uber for drivers as it offered slightly better pay and an option to accumulate the company’s stock. There’s no data yet for any rides taken by the Ocasio-Cortez campaign between in July and August.
Of course, nothing is wrong with using Uber, unless you’re a democratic socialist who denounced the organization for driving cabbies to suicide. That’s what media darling Ocasio-Cortez tweeted:
NYC’s fourth driver suicide. Yellow cab drivers are in financial ruin due to the unregulated expansion of Uber. What was a living wage job now pays under minimum.
We need:
– to call Uber drivers what they are: EMPLOYEES, not contractors
– Fed jobs guarantee
– Prep for automation
Of course, Ocasio-Cortez’s hypocrisy is hardly new for a Democrat who spouts socialist nonsense. Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders owns three homes. And Al Gore, the brains behind the failed global-warming scare film An Inconvenient Truth got a little inconvenient truth of his own when the Tennessee Center for Policy Research revealed, using public records, that his 10,070 square-foot estate, Tennessee’s version of the Ponderosa, racked up a $60,000 utility bill over two years.
That aside, here we have again the democratic socialist in action: Do as I say, not as I do.
Restaurant Closed
In July, one of the candidate’s favorite restaurants announced its impending doom. Ocasio-Cortez used to work there, so she dropped by the other day to say so long to the gang.
The restaurant I used to work at is closing its doors.
I swung by today to say hi one last time, and kid around with friends like old times.
I’m a normal, working person who chose to run for office, because I believe we can have a better future.
You can do it too. We all can.
But the former barmaid doesn’t seem to understand that one of the policies she proposes, jacking up the minimum wage to stratospheric levels, is one reason the restaurant closed. The owner told the New York Post that New York’s new wage for businesses that have more than 11 employees helped make his decision. With 150 employees, he simply couldn’t foot the bill.
“The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees,” he said.
New York’s wage goes to $15 per hour in December, which means that whatever his payroll is now, it will be much higher in 2019.
As Investor’s Business Daily reported, business in the Big Apple “saw the minimum wage jump $2 an hour to $13 this year. And they face another $2 increase starting next year. For businesses like restaurants that hire a lot of unskilled labor, that means a government-imposed 36% increase in labor costs in just two years.”
IBD called Ocasio-Cortez’s problem “economic illiteracy,” which might be the hopeful way of putting it.
National Parks: Monuments to Marx
Third on the list of her latest and greatest tweets is claiming the national park system is a good example of democratic socialism at work.
Back home after a lovely few days off enjoying US examples of Democratic Socialism, like:
– Acadia National Park
Um … no. Just … no.
As Chris Deaton noted in the Weekly Standard, “The National Park System is not socialism in action: It is a mix of public goods, like monuments, and government maintenance of park land, which is not an interruption of private economic activity or a usurpation of private property rights. Claiming otherwise is part of a years-old Internet meme…. A fishing trip to Yellowstone is not a celebration of Marx and Engels.”
Well, she is 28 years old, and perhaps hasn’t read beyond her self-affirming Twitter and Facebook posts.
Photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: AP Images
