Thread: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rise reveals rampant economic illiteracy in US

"Ocasio-Cortez has proposed free "Medicare for All," free college tuition, guaranteed federal employment at $15 an hour and free houses for the nation’s poorest. These ideas have been conservatively priced at $40 trillion — twice as much money currently listed on the national debt.
It’s the kind of extremist proposal you’d expect to hear from someone who has never made a budget, never been responsible for a business and payroll and never had taxes deducted from a hard-earned paycheck. It's the kind of proposal you've heard from Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him."



Ocasio-Cortez's rise reveals rampant economic illiteracy in US

By Anne Rathbone Bradley, opinion contributor — 11/14/18 02:30 PM EST

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), made headlines when she revealed that she wouldn’t be able to afford Washington, D.C. rent until her government salary kicks in.
The lack of affordable housing in Washington is no joke, but the predicament also speaks to the young lawmaker’s financial literacy — or lack thereof. The 29-year-old didn’t think to consider something as basic as the relocation expenses of a new job opportunity.
If she doesn’t know how much an apartment costs, how much confidence should taxpayers have in her ability to effectively deliver trillions of dollars in campaign promises?
Ocasio-Cortez has proposed free "Medicare for All," free college tuition, guaranteed federal employment at $15 an hour and free houses for the nation’s poorest. These ideas have been conservatively priced at $40 trillion — twice as much money currently listed on the national debt.
It’s the kind of extremist proposal you’d expect to hear from someone who has never made a budget, never been responsible for a business and payroll and never had taxes deducted from a hard-earned paycheck. It's the kind of proposal you've heard from Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him.
While an undergraduate student at Boston University, Ocasio-Cortez’s coursework in economics apparently didn’t make much of an impression about the power of market enterprise.
The problem with her myriad of “free” giveaways is it’s unbelievably naïve and empirically falsifiable to think the federal government is more cost-efficient than the free market. The first rule of economic thinking is that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." Choices have costs.
Economics helps us understand that it is entrepreneurs, inventors and new ideas propelled by ordinary people that power an economy. She should have learned that at BU.
If you want to see young, successful people who are making a real difference, look at someone who started his or her own business, got his or her foot in the door at a prestigious company or worked for what they achieved.
Most people don’t want to be stuck in a $15-an-hour, guaranteed government job because it stunts their long-term opportunities. The private sector incentivizes hard work and lessons learned, and it pays better than any government position.
Unfortunately, the world view espoused by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) paints the economy as a zero-sum equation unless the government directs the choices. Their proposals call for showering benefits on certain groups and paying for it by taking money from the wealthy. If millionaires and corporations are losing, then surely welfare recipients will be winning, their logic holds.
That’s not how the global economy works. The free market is the world's largest and most successful poverty alleviation program. Market investment and entrepreneurship far outperform government investment, and the resulting surges in economic activity benefits everyone, particularly the poorest.
There’s also an inadvertently tragic ramification of today’s trendy Democratic Socialist ideas. If you actually added $40 trillion to the U.S. national debt, as Ocasio-Cortez has proposed, it would be younger people and future generations that have to bear the astronomical tax burden when the bills come due.
The proliferation of these ill-conceived economic ideas over the past few years speaks to the lack of economic literacy in our education system.
Graduates of Boston University’s economics program are supposed to be able to “understand economic theory … and be able to apply these models to evaluate policies and real*-world events,” according to the school’s website.
Ocasio-Cortez would do well to understand that the path to prosperity is not built on government handouts but on free people unleashing their human creativity to advance the common good. An honest to goodness economics debate between Ocasio-Cortez and her opponent could have been a sorely-needed corrective lesson. By exposing the flimsy arguments of central planners like Ocasio-Cortez, it may have helped young people understand economics better than any college course ever could.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/...5bh7RblAQA8bk4

I think she spiked her own "cocktails" on the job while tending bar...LOL

Dumb as a box of rocks. Please do not have children.

Originally Posted by Beezer

I think she spiked her own "cocktails" on the job while tending bar...LOL

Dumb as a box of rocks. Please do not have children.

Rocks are smarter than she is. They know when to just sit there and be quiet.

Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives

The people who can least believe there are other people who want to move in a more socialist direction are the socialist escapees. The ones who've actually lived it. Linked is a MUST read column:
"Cuba’s socialist revolution was supposed to work for workers — like my grandparents who lived in Miami during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. In January 1959, just two weeks after Fidel Castro seized power, they returned to the island to care for my grandmother’s ailing mother. For the next 20 years, they remained prisoners in their own country.
As Cuba’s political and economic situation worsened, my grandfather told a friend he wanted to return to the United States. Someone overheard the conversation and reported him to the authorities. For this, the Castro regime threw him in jail. He was later stripped of his job and salary as an accountant and assigned to feed zoo animals. In addition to the emotional distress it caused, this made my family’s financial circumstances even more precarious."

My family escaped socialism, now my fellow Democrats think we should move the party in its direction

Giancarlo Sopo, Opinion contributor Published 3:15 a.m. ET Aug. 28, 2018 | Updated 8:10 a.m. ET Aug. 28, 2018

Democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled, except its proponents promise to be nicer when seizing your business.


(Photo: Mark Lennihan, AP)

Cuba’s socialist revolution was supposed to work for workers — like my grandparents who lived in Miami during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. In January 1959, just two weeks after Fidel Castro seized power, they returned to the island to care for my grandmother’s ailing mother. For the next 20 years, they remained prisoners in their own country.
As Cuba’s political and economic situation worsened, my grandfather told a friend he wanted to return to the United States. Someone overheard the conversation and reported him to the authorities. For this, the Castro regime threw him in jail. He was later stripped of his job and salary as an accountant and assigned to feed zoo animals. In addition to the emotional distress it caused, this made my family’s financial circumstances even more precarious.
To understand my grandparents’ desperation to flee socialism, imagine leaving everything behind and starting anew at almost 60 years old.
I was born in Miami a little after my family was able to return to America — when President Jimmy Carter allowed travel restrictions to lapse. Growing up, a framed photo of my parents with President Ronald Reagan was a mainstay in the living room of our modest duplex. Yet, during the first election I was able to vote, I served as a precinct captain for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Four years later, I knocked on doors in New Hampshire for then-Sen. Barack Obama. In 2016, my wife and I drove 14 hours to volunteer for Hillary Clinton and this June, we marched in support of immigrant families.
The popularity of 'democratic socialism'

Despite my working-class immigrant roots, I am concerned by the popularity of socialism within my party. On the night of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in New York, I thought her use of the term was a misnomer. Then I began studying the views of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the rapidly growing national organization she belongs to, and was disturbed by what I learned.
Like those of yesteryear, today’s socialists believe the government should nationalize major industries, propose eliminating private ownership of companies, and reject profits. In other words, democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled, except its proponents promise to be nicer when seizing your business.
When I confronted some progressive friends about this, they initially dismissed my concerns. After sharing some articles with them, the conversation shifted to "they just want us to be more like the Nordic countries" and "they’re not like real socialists!" Both are reductionist, self-delusions to avoid confronting difficult truths.
The latter is a particularly absurd fallacy because it requires one to believe that adults who willfully join socialist organizations, sound like socialists and call themselves socialists are not what they claim to be.
Claims of "Nordic socialism" are also largely exaggerated. As Jostein Skaar, of Oslo Economics, told me, "I would stress that the Norwegian economic system is capitalistic, heavily influenced by the U.S. and U.K."
This is probably why DSA argues that the Nordic model is not good enough.
Another view: If Democrats embrace socialism to get away from Donald Trump, they can kiss the midterms goodbye
More on Democrats: The Democratic Party left me behind — and I'm not alone
More on socialism: CNN thinks that socialism is cool. My grandparents from the USSR would disagree.
The ideological counterparts of America's democratic socialists are likelier to be found to our south than in northern Europe. For instance, Cuba — where the state controls three-fourths of the economy, limits private-sector activity, and employs the majority of workers — is clearly more representative of DSA's economic vision than Denmark, where 89 percent of the wealth is privately owned and seven out of 10 Danes work in the private sector.
Moreover, as an investigation by Transparency International revealed, the Venezuelan government owns at least 511 companies — resulting in a state-owned enterprises per-capita ratio that is more than three times greater than all of Scandinavia’s combined.
As someone who spent years defending Democrats from "socialista" charges, I understand why people roll their eyes when Cuba and Venezuela are mentioned alongside democratic socialism, but to reject the comparison simply because we don’t like those countries' outcomes misses the point of why they turned out the way they did. I’m under no illusion that increased access to health care and education will turn us into the Venezuelan capital Caracas, but it’s foolish to believe that democratic socialists — who promise to end capitalism — would be satisfied with Medicare for all, if given the reins of power.
This must never happen. The descendants of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels should have no place in the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Given its horrific record of human suffering, it would be a moral disgrace for Democrats to embrace socialism just to win elections, as some suggest. Those who use the blitheful ignorance of many for the political gain of a few deserve to lose. Indeed, if socialism represents the future of the Democratic Party, that’s a dystopia no American should want to be a part of.

Giancarlo Sopo is a Florida-based communications consultant specializing in Latin America. Follow him on Twitter at @giancarlosopo.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...9jiufk1j5QFCYs