Quoted in a sprawling, 3,600 word hagiography in Time magazine, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who is nothing if not a person who acts entitled all the time, whined that she has never seen American prosperity “in my adult life.”
One can assume that Ocasio-Cortez, who champions policies that reward those who eschew responsibility, may have become an adult when she hit 18, since she favors giving the right to vote to voters at the age of 16, but to be generous, let’s assume that she was 18 when she became an adult. She is now almost 30, so the period of which she referred to would date back roughly 12 years, to 2007, when the financial crisis hit.
Ocasio-Cortez complained that not only she but her entire generation has not seen American prosperity, moaning, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity. I have never seen that, or experienced it, really, in my adult life.”
Hmm. Scroll down to the third paragraph of the 3,600 word puff piece and there is this bald-faced admission: “At the same time, she’s a freshman legislator trying to get the hang of her first big full-time job.”
The piece notes that Ocasio-Cortez took out student loans to enroll at Boston University, graduating in 2011 with a degree in economics and international relations, incurring roughly $25,000 in student loan debt. After she graduated, she got a job at an educational nonprofit, “with a side gig as a bartender at a Manhattan taco joint. Most of her peers were piecing together two or three jobs to stay ahead of the bills … For most of her 20s, she lived paycheck to paycheck.”
Thus Ocasio-Cortez’s “first big full-time job” was living off the taxpayer dole as a member of Congress. And as has been widely noted, a FAQ that accompanied her much-ballyhooed Green New Deal stated that the deal “guarantees to everyone … economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.”
Time’s puff piece does its best to support the radical policies espoused by Ocasio-Cortez as the author lauds socialism, first quoting Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats complaining, “We were all children of the recession. There’s an overwhelming sense that the economic and political system in our country is rigged.” Then the author continues, “That’s why young Americans have become increasingly attracted to democratic socialism, which aims to build a stronger social safety net through democratic elections.”
As Jim Geraghty of National Review noted on Friday, “ … the U.S. economy has added jobs for 100 consecutive months, and there are seven million unfilled jobs in the country. The housing market either quickly or gradually recovered depending upon your region, and auto production recovered, both at companies that received government bailouts and those that did not. There’s not too much inflation or deflation.”
Geraghty points out, “If the current state of the economy – unemployment at 3.8 percent, 3.1 percent annual GDP growth, high business confidence, high consumer confidence — does not meet your definition of ‘prosperity,’ what does?”