Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will have completed three months in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, and already she has provided enough gaffes to fill a book. On Saturday, she added to her collection by suggesting that the 22nd Amendment was written “to make sure [Franklin D.] Roosevelt did not get re-elected.” The 22nd Amendment wasn’t ratified wasn’t submitted to the states for ratification until 1947 — two years after FDR had died in office.
Ocasio-Cortez’s most unforgivable mistakes are in the area of economics, which she claims to have majored in at Boston University. Her most famous gaffe in this area was her suggestion in February that the $3 billion the city of New York “saved” when Amazon scrapped its plan to open a regional headquarters in Queens could be used on “our infrastructure, our subway system, our schools, our teachers’ salaries, our firefighters’ budgets.”
As Marc Thiessen explained at the time:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to realize that New York does not have $3 billion in cash sitting around waiting to be spent on her socialist dreams. The subsidies to Amazon were tax incentives, not cash payouts. It is Amazon’s money, which New York agreed to make tax-exempt, so the company would invest it in building its new headquarters, hiring new workers and generating tens of billions in new tax revenue.
Now Ocasio-Cortez has provided fresh grist for her critics. This morning, she tweeted:
Croissants at LaGuardia are going for SEVEN DOLLARS A PIECE ????
Yet some people think getting a whole hour of personal, dedicated human labor for $15 is too expensive??
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 1, 2019
She appears not to have thought ahead to what happens when the increased labor costs forces the owner of the bakery to increase the cost of his croissants to, say, $10. Does the hourly wage go up at the same right, or is this another formula that “economists” like Ocasio-Cortez use?
