AOC’s Bright Idea: ‘To Get The Virus Under Control, We Need To Pay People To Stay Home’

 

On Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who apparently thinks there is a money tree that will offer an inexhaustible supply of funding for any leftist Bright Idea™ in her head that she would like to implement, decided that the way to solve the coronavirus pandemic is to pay Americans to stay home.

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “To get the virus under control, we need to pay people to stay home.”

She then resorted to the typical clichéd Democrat rhetoric about how Republicans favor the rich over the poor, stating, “Republicans are mad at this when they literally just voted to do just this in March. The reason they’re opposed to it now is because last time they got a Wall Street bailout and this time all that’s left is helping working people, the disabled, the poor, etc.”

Ocasio-Cortez then sneered, “Funny how you didn’t hear Republicans complain about ‘spending other people’s money’ or ask ‘how are we going to pay for it?’ when they insisted on creating a $4 trillion leveraged slush fund for their Wall Street buddies in March.”

Yet Ocasio-Cortez was certainly around last May when Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposed the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act.

An op-ed in The Las Vegas Review-Journal stated:

The HEROES Act isn’t a serious proposal. It’s a laundry list of liberal goals and pet projects. Start with repealing the limit Republicans imposed on state and local tax deductions as part of their tax reform bill in 2017. That cap led to wealthy people in blue states paying higher taxes because they couldn’t deduct the full amount they paid in state income and property taxes. Democrats have worked tirelessly to repeal this limit. Turns out they’re just fine with tax cuts for the rich — who live in blue states. That giveaway — unrelated to the coronavirus — would reduce federal revenues by $136 billion.

Other ideas Ocasio-Cortez supports that would expedite the bankruptcy of the United States include her Green New Deal, which has been estimated to cost between $51 and $93 trillion in new government spending, according to the American Action Forum. Another spending behemoth Ocasio-Cortez favors: free tuition for colleges and universities, which has been estimated to cost at least $79 billion a year according to the Department of Education, The New York Times reported.

A bill proposed in 2017 that would have eliminated tuition at four-year public colleges and universities, authorizing the Secretary of Education to establish grant programs to eliminate tuition and required fees at four-year public colleges and universities, would cost roughly $47 billion every year for the federal government’s share and cost about $750 billion over the ten years following.

AOC’s spending frenzy comes in the face of this: according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the current national debt stands at roughly $27 trillion. That is roughly $82,000 for every single person in the United States of America.