WaPo Fact Checks Ocasio-Cortez Statements, All They Can Say is 'Huh?'
The newest rising star of the Democratic Party, New York congressional candidate and democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been making the rounds on the mainstream media recently to promote her campaign and political ideals.
Despite receiving largely softball interviews from friendly media hosts, Ocasio-Cortez has had quite a few stumbles and made plenty of questionable statements, so much so that even the liberals at The Washington Post felt compelled to “fact check” some of her more “eyebrow-raising” remarks.
In fact, prior to even digging into Ocasio-Cortez’s many questionable statements, The Post could only respond with “Huh?” to the candidate’s suggestion that funeral costs were a driving expense behind the high cost of medical care.
The Post declined to assign their typical “Pinocchio” rating to the collection of her statements but nevertheless proceeded to disprove many of the statements she has made over the past several weeks.
In a July 13 interview with PBS “Firing Line,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed, “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
The Post classified that “sweeping” remark as a “rookie” mistake and “poppycock” that would typically cause trouble for the average politician, and noted that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had shown that the percentage of American workers who held two jobs had actually declined since the 2008 recession, and comprised only about 5 percent of the workforce.
Furthermore, of that roughly 5 percent of workers who hold two jobs, about 58 percent hold a full-time job and a part-time job, with only about 6 percent of the initial 5 percent actually holding two full-time jobs, meaning hardly anyone is truly forced to work upwards of 80 hours a week. Not mentioned by The Post is the fact that an individual holding two jobs has zero effect on the unemployment rate.
On May 30, in an interview with the Intercepted podcast, Ocasio-Cortez claimed, “ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.”
The Post classified that remark as an “urban legend” which derived from a clause in a 2016 appropriations bill which required the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency “make available” 34,000 beds, but not necessarily to fill them nightly. In essence, the language simply ensured that funds for beds would not be spent on other things.
Making the statement even more ridiculous is the fact that the language Ocasio-Cortez was referencing was actually removed from the 2017 and 2018 appropriations bills, meaning the whole thing is a moot point.
In an August 7 interview with “Pod Save America,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed, “They (national Democrats) were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
Aside from the obvious contradiction of an upper-middle class being more moderate but also not exiting anymore at the same time, The Post noted that the “sweeping rhetoric” was flat wrong. While the middle class has reportedly shrunk some over the years, the upper-middle class has actually grown larger, and in fact has more than doubled from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent of the population in 2014.
In her August 8 appearance on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Ocasio-Cortez made two questionable statements, one which criticized a Koch brothers-funded study about her Medicare-for-all plan — which the candidate claims would be cheaper than the current system — as well as another statement which confused the Supreme Court’s ruling of Obamacare’s individual mandate as being a tax with the monthly premium payments people must pay for health insurance.
A similar statement about the cost of Medicare-for-all had actually earned three Pinocchios from The Post previously, which noted that other studies have found that the cost for health care would actually increase by trillions under such a program. As to the second statement, that was chalked up to simply “not understanding policy nuances” … again, a rather rookie mistake that a seasoned politician would be unlikely to make.
In the end, The Post declared that all five statements from Ocasio-Cortez were “false,” and it is quite obvious that the left’s favorite new candidate has little clue about that of which she speaks.
That could come back to bite Democrats in the future, but all we conservatives can ask is that the left keep pushing Ocasio-Cortez out there to face the public, as she is only helping Republican re-election efforts at the moment with her ludicrously false statements that reveal her utter lack of knowledge.
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