When a prominent Democrat has lost Chuck Todd, the handwriting is on the wall.
Three days ago, I predicted that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sealing her fate when she took (and probably deserved) credit for killing the deal that would have brought 25,000 high-paying Amazon jobs to New York City. It's not that the young woman with boundless self-confidence in her views has no clue about how tax incentives work (though that is obviously true, since she crowed that the $3 billion in tax abatements could be spent on subways, schools, and the like). Ignorance and simple-mindedness are no obstacles to a Democrat winning approval from party bosses.
No, Sandy O's real infraction was in exposing and opposing the sweetheart deals between Democrats and the tech oligarchy. Both sides to the Grand Bargain see it as a key to their goals. The Democrats want and need the tech titans' thumbs on the scale in digital discourse and campaign donations from them. The new-age monopolists need antitrust protection for their market dominance, government contracts (see: Amazon's DOD cloud deal), and access so their concerns can be heard early, privately, and effectively, before the general public has a clue as to what is being protected, given away, or winked at.
Yesterday, we saw the first video fruits of Democrats' need to undermine and eventually unseat the Queens phenom on Meet the Press. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and host Chuck Todd impugned her intelligence. Here is the full eight-minute segment:
The key moments making the same basic point I did in my blog three days ago, as summarized by Bruce Golding of The New York Post:
“The truth of the matter is OCasio Cortez was right. This was a big taxpayer waste of money.”
How can you say this? It’s like saying a grocery store is wasting money by putting an item on sale. IOW, charging less for a product than usual. AKA a tax incentive. You know why that’s done? To bring in customers that normally would not patronize them. It’s a ‘less money or no money’ situation.
Nothing was “wasted” because nothing was spent.
Now NYC will get 100% taxation of NOTHING because Amazon isn’t moving there. Yeah, that’s a ‘great savings of taxpayer money’ vs. receiving 70% of $10 billion in taxes.