Last week, Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, newly elected to Congress, complained that she could not afford an apartment in Washington, D.C. until she began collecting her congressional salary. Ocasio-Cortez had informed The New York Times, “I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real.”
Either Ocasio-Cortez spends money like wildfire or her claim isn’t true.
As Fox News reports, “Records show she has more than enough to plunk down on an apartment in the U.S. capital.” Fox News adds that Ocasio-Cortez “reported having between $15,001 and $50,000 in her checking account as of the end of April 2018, according to a Financial Disclosure Report she submitted to the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. The financial disclosure also reveals that she has an investment account valued between $1,001 and $15,000.”
Real estate website Zillow states that the median rent in Washington, D.C. is $2,700; Ocasio-Cortez will bring home $174,000 a year for serving in Congress.
That minimum of $15,000 that Ocasio-Cortez had in the bank is 15 times the amount 57% of average Americans had in their savings, as USA Today reported in May 2018. USA Today stated, “The average American has less than $4,000 in savings, while 57% of U.S. adults have less than $1,000 to their names.”
Ocasio-Cortez has had some difficulty speaking the complete unvarnished truth or dealing with facts before; last summer she claimed she had a hard life growing up in the Bronx, yet her late father Sergio Cortez-Roman bought a quaint three-bedroom in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1991, when she was about two. In her campaign page bio, she conveniently did not mention that her family moved from Parkchester to Westchester County when she was five years old.
She later changed her bio.
In July, left-leaning Politifact rated her claim “Pants on Fire” that unemployment was low because “everyone has two jobs” and “people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
In August, The Washington Post even ran a piece debunking many of Ocasio-Cortez’s claims. Some of those claims included: “Why aren’t we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can’t afford access to health care? That is part of the cost of our system”; “ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009”; “They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America”; and “The reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that everyday Americans make is a tax. And so, while it may not seem like we pay that tax on April 15th, we pay it every single month or we do pay at tax season if we don’t buy, you know, these plans off of the exchange.”