Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is proving to be far more sensitive to criticism than the president ever was, though she’s not being called out for her petulance. What’s more, she can’t even admit when she’s wrong.
Take her recent inane comments celebrating the demise of a deal to lure e-tail behemoth Amazon to her home state and home city. After Jeff Bezos appeared on the verge of building a second headquarters in an economically depressed outlying section of New York City, he scuttled the deal because it looked like the $3 billion tax break negotiated with Gov. Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio wasn’t going to be approved after all, despite the estimated $30 billion in revenue that Amazon was going to generate for a state that is currently facing a $2.3 billion budget shortfall for the current fiscal year.
For her part, Ocasio-Cortez cheered the decision. (Related: AOC celebrates Amazon pulling out of NYC as astonished Democrats finally come face to face with the horror they have unleashed.)
She wrote on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1096117499492478977
Granted, Amazon’s got a record of mistreating some employees and underpaying others. But overall, the company would have provided higher-than-average wages for tens of thousands of New Yorkers who would have been paying some of the country’s highest state income tax rates, more than offsetting the $3 billion break Amazon was getting.
And the only way that Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet can be read is that the congresswoman was extremely happy that the deal fell through.
But anyone who read it that way is an idiot, according to her.
Petulance is no substitute for leadership
After being widely criticized by New York politicians and not a few conservatives, Ocasio-Cortez lashed out at her detractors in a series of tweets doubling down on her opposition to the Amazon deal and claiming that yes, she does “understand” how tax incentives actually work, The Daily Wire reported.
Her defensive tweets were in response to criticism from Erik Engquist, the editor for Crain’s New York Business, who noted that while he normally defends Ocasio-Cortez for her alleged intelligence, her comments regarding New York “invest[ing] those $3 billion” instead of ‘giving’ it to Amazon left him without words.
“If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to,” she said last week. "We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to."
Engquist noted, “I’ve been telling @AOC critics that she is smart, but what do I say when she says nonsense like 'we could invest those $3 billion in [@amazon tax breaks] in our district. We could hire more teachers. We can fix our subways, we can put a lot of people to work for that money.’”
She called such criticism “knee-jerk” and said, "Not sure how many pundits talking about Amazon even read the deal or where it was going. $500+ million of the deal was *capital grants.* $2.5 billion in tax breaks. It’s fair to ask why we don’t invest the capital for public use, + why we don’t give working people a tax break.”
“There’s NO WAY that this deal - one of the biggest giveaways in state history - could possibly have been bad, right?” she continued, noting that “the debate *must* be over my intelligence & understanding instead of the merits of the deal.”
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1098000445912559619
Petulance is no substitute for leadership.
Read more about Ocasio-Cortez’s antics at CortezWatch.com.
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