AOC goes for but fails at a "save" over Amazon jobs in NYC

Rep. Alexandria Obviously-Comatose (D-NY) sent out a misleading tweet bragging about a new report that Amazon will be bringing jobs to New York City. She appears to take credit for what is actually a huge screw up on her part.

Last summer AOC went after Amazon after they struck a deal with NY State to open a second headquarters in NY City. The move would have brought 25,000 jobs to the Big Apple and all New York had to do, as they do with many mega companies, is to provide the company with $3 billion in state and local subsidies. Due to AOC's attack on the company, Amazon backed out of the deal.

On Friday, however, it was reported that Amazon was leasing a 335,000-square-foot office space in Manhattan. The move is slated to bring in about 1,500 jobs, not the 25,000 as originally planned.

The low-information socialist celebrated the news on Twitter.

"Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway - *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways," Ocasio-Cortez said. "Maybe the Trump admin should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families," she added with obvious envy toward successful wealthy people.

She also posted a picture of herself, taking the credit and sitting on a couch with the caption:

"Me waiting on the haters to apologize after we were proven right on Amazon and saved the public billions." 

Many were ticked off by her "victory lap" and pointed to the math of the jobs that were still lost from her battle with Amazon.

The Daily Caller's Peter Hasson tweeted:

"Another day, another viral misleading tweet from AOC. Amazon is leasing office space in Manhattan for 1,500 employees, which is 6% of the 25,000 jobs its HQ2 in Queens (her district) was supposed to add." 

Caleb Hall, political strategist wrote:

"AOC could have had 25,000 jobs in her district from Amazon, but now, Amazon is only offering 1,500 jobs using rental space OUTSIDE her district. She's taking a victory lap for a 94% loss in jobs in NYC and 25,000 job loss in her district. Socialist logic is incredible."

AOC often lies in her tweet posts and elsewhere. On Thursday she wrote that her family "might've just starved" had Trump tightened requirements for food stamp recipients been the policy when her father died in 2008.

The lie, this time, was how she misrepresented the new rule, which only applies to childless, able-bodied adults under 50.

The socialist tweeted:

“My family relied on food stamps (EBT) when my dad died at 48. I was a student. If this happened then, we might’ve just starved. Now, many people will. It’s shameful how the GOP works overtime to create freebies for the rich while dissolving lifelines of those who need it most.”

Evidently, the only people who would possibly "starve" would be the able-bodied childless adults who refuse to work. And let's be honest, nobody starves in the USA because of the charities and food programs available.

And when her father died, AOC was 19 and in college [which was a waste of tuition] and would have been claimed as a dependent by her mother, so the family would have received the assistance.


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No More Free Rides

If you get something for free, you place less value on it than you would if you had to pay for it. This is just simple, common sense. So what makes anyone think that welfare and other entitlements is a good thing?

When I worked as a psychotherapist in New York City, a substantial number of the patients that came to the clinic were Medicaid recipients. They were seen once weekly and were given ongoing appointment schedules. If they had to cancel, they were asked to give the clinic at least 24 hour notice so that we could use their timeslots effectively. But cancelling appropriately was as rare as a liberal using facts to make decisions rather than feelings. Patients who paid out of pocket, or who had coverage through their employer (those with jobs often had coverage), were much more dependable when it came to showing up for session and for cancelling when necessary.

Fee for service therapists at the clinic only got paid when they actually had a patient session. There was no penalty for Medicaid patients not calling in to cancel--we call them "no shows," and this had become an ongoing problem. The situation became one in which the therapist was dependent upon the mental patient to do the right thing and allow a scheduling in the open timeslot. 

Entitlements like Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other programs that give away free stuff is fine and necessary, but it is all too easy to use these programs to create strong dependency and a nanny state. (I am not referring to Social Security--we've paid into that.) Moreover, in the case of psychotherapy, where clients pay nothing for treatment, there is a devaluing of treatment when it's free. I believe there should be a small penalty for being a "no show" and the patient must pay it by the following visit or be terminated from treatment.

The government has become too much like a rewarding parent, or Santa Claus. If you want to make people responsible adults, you need to hold them accountable for their actions. No more free rides. No more Obama phones. It's time for our nation to put on their big boy pants.

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Putting a Hole in the Sinking Ship to Let the Water Out

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." Thomas Jefferson

With sequestration here and our leaders seemingly clueless as to how we can cut spending, I have a few ideas, some lifted from minds more brilliant than Obama's, (which, in order to be more brilliant than him, is referred to in India as a "left hand job"), and I have a few of my own. If you have some thoughts you feel might stem the gushing of government spending that you believe might help, please feel free to comment. If you are a liberal and even so much as mention George W. Bush in your comment, please feel free to remove your head from your anatomy south of your waist and get real.

First of all, we need to stop government funding of loser companies such as Solyndra and Sun Power Solar Panels. They suck the sunlight to produce energy, but at a cost higher than they can recover in profit. If this sounds like the US Postal Service's methods of operating, you're on the right track. And speaking of the USPS, there are literally thousands of postal workers who have no work to do and sit on their butts all day collecting a salary. No wonder it's going bust. I say get rid of these useless positions  by putting the workers where they can be most useful--in military bases as civilian employees or in the military as patriots.

Next, we must stop giving Obama-supporting companies, or any politically involved company for that matter, tax breaks. According to Wikipedia, Facebook netted $5.1 billion in profits in 2012 and yet they paid no taxes. To put icing on the vomit in your mouth, they received a tax refund of $429 million, according to the Daily Mail Online, Citizens for Tax Justice, and MSN Money. Is it just me, or does this seem a bit unfair to Joe the Taxpayer who's paying an additional two grand per year, on average? Let's face it, Facebook isn't totally kosher (forgive me Mark Z.), when it comes to keeping their customer's identity private. They agreed to settle with the US Trade Commission in 2011 on this matter.

I believe the president should take vacations along with his First Squeeze. I honestly don`t hold anything against that. But when a POTUS talks about tightening the belt, and then jets off on separate jets from his wife, that`s just wasteful and hypocritical. If W. did it with Laura, Chris Matthews would have a conniption. They say Obama`s trips to Hawaii alone, since becoming monarch, has totalled over $20 million. If he and the family didn't wander off so far on vacation, they could save us a fortune by taking the helicopter as opposed to Air Force One, which costs about $180 thousand an hour to operate.

Then there`s the GSA and their elaborate parties. They got to party in Vegas, baby, last year, and the taxpayer got to pay the bill of $823 thousand. Nancy Pelosi`s airborne parties didn`t even cost the taxpayer that much, although the booze flowed like Niagara Falls at her parties too. The MSM forgot to cover that little fact.

Emily Goff of The Foundry cites ten examples of wasteful federal spending and poor investing, which I will outline, but you can read her entire article if you click here

1. A reality TV show in India
2. An EPA grant awarded to China (because they need the money) for $1.2 million to study pig poop.
3. Amtrak, a government subsidized company, that lost $833.8 million in a ten year period over its food and drinks for customers.

4. US Navy purchase of 450 thousand gallons of biofuel at a cost of $12 million, or in brain friendlier terms, $27 per gallon. What's it going to be next, algae aircraft?
5. A total of 1832 conferences between 2008 and 2009 at a cost of $121 million. And what did these government workers learn about running a business on our tax money? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

6. "Robo Squirrel" where $325 thousand was spent on the development of a robotic squirrel in order to learn how rattlesnakes don't like them so much. I could have told that to the National Science Foundation myself and saved us all some money.
7. $2 million on Cupcake small business shops. Don't ask; read Goff's article.
8. Food Stamp waste. Yes, believe it or not, some people on Food Stamps don't just use them for food wholesome anymore--they buy alcohol, junk food, sugary drinks, and some person has even used the SNAP program to buy an exotic dancer, and didn't even get a lap dance in the process.
9. Beer brewing in New Hampshire. I guess if it's good enough to brew beer on our dime in the White House, why not New Hampshire?
10. A "Bridge to Nowhere." Yes, we taxpayers have paid $520 thousand to pay for the Stevenson Road Covered Bridge in Green County, Ohio. (Now you know why it's called Green County). The bridge was last used in 2003--do you see my point?

While all the wasted money I've cited above is merely a wiz in the ocean, it still shows how we need to look more closely, much more closely, at how we allow the government to spend our money. In a very short time, our deficit is going to reach $17 trillion. It takes over half a million years to count that high at one number per second. Even if you count fast, you're not going to make it to the end. Will we?





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