I don’t know, who knows what they actually teach at Boston U’s modern “economics” college.
Here is her extra credit class she took from Bernie. These quotes include commentary from the Hotair writer:
>>”“But one of the things that we saw is, if people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra wealthy — for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he pays as much as his secretary paid, 15 percent tax rate, if corporations paid — if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there. That’s two trillion dollars in ten years.”
I hate to point this out to a math major, but $2 trillion over ten years doesn’t even pay for 20% of Medicare for All even under Bernie Sanders’ rosy projections, let alone the rest of Ocasio-Cortez’ agenda.
And alt- energy solution:
>>“If we get people to pay their fair share, that’s $2 trillion in ten years. Now if we implement a carbon tax on top of that, so that we can transition and financially incentivize people away from fossil fuels, if we implement a carbon tax — that’s an additional amount, a large amount of revenue that we can have.”
Well, how much more? She never says, and it’s clear that she has no idea. Earlier, Ocasio-Cortez also says, “it’s going to take $3 trillion to $4 trillion to transition us to 100 percent renewable economy.” That means that her revenue from the carbon tax and punitive fossil-fuel tax would necessarily decline over the following period, and that the economy would have to generate enough revenue to overcome the $4 trillion spent on the conversion before supplying the first dollar to Medicare for All, let alone the rest of her agenda. It’s worth pointing out too that this conversion would cost double the amount that Ocasio-Cortez says she’d gain from reversing the tax cuts and soaking the rich. We’re actually $2 trillion in the hole just to start with her agenda.
Lastly, start dismantling the military:
>>“Then the last key, which is extremely extremely important is re-prioritization. Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for,” she said. “They’re, like, ‘we don’t want another fighter jet!’ They’re, like, ‘don’t give us another nuclear bomb,’ you know?”
We have to unpack a couple of levels of ignorance in this statement. First off, $700 billion is the entire annual defense budget for the United States, not a “budget increase.” It’s true that the final defense budget outstripped the original Department of Defense request of $639 billion for FY2018, but only by $70 billion, not $700 billion. If we rolled back and capped DoD spending to FY2017 levels, we’d end up saving less than a trillion dollars over ten years — and if she thinks the Pentagon would cheer that result, she’s clearly not taken the time to discuss it with the military branches.