When you want to keep the ball in your court, you pivot, but there’s a skill to it.
Some people have it, some don’t, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not have it. Once again, she was asked how she would pay for her agenda, which comes with a $40 trillion price tag over the next decade. Forgiving student loan debt, public housing, free education, and single-payer health care are some of the top ticket action items. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked her how would she pay for it. In short, spending trillions will save us money…somehow. The insurgent democratic socialist who booted top Democrat Joe Crowley (D-NY) in a massive upset primary challenge, who supposedly holds an economics degree, doesn’t know how to answer. The reason: they don’t know how to pay for it. Soak the rich doesn’t work—and while she details the tired line of every industrial nation has some form of singe-payer, they always leave out how much of a disaster these systems are. Take the United Kingdom, which she uses as an example, the National Health Service is overwhelmed and patient stacking has begun. This was utterly predictable. Also, 16,900 people were forced to wait in ambulancesin order to get treatment. Yes, the joys of democratic socialism. It may have a different name, but it’s just as crappy as its cousin.
CNN's Jake Tapper presses socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how she'll pay for her $40 Trillion in government programs.
— Ryan Saavedra ???? (@RealSaavedra) September 16, 2018
She can't answer.pic.twitter.com/RDvHYoRSZA
.@jaketapper does a great job pressing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how she'd pay for her healthcare plan -- she says economic activity from millennial who would buy homes if they didn't have student debt -- and highlights that she did not actually answer his two attempts to ask.
— Sarah Westwood (@sarahcwestwood) September 16, 2018
Jake Tapper asks Alexandria Ocasio Cortez how she will pay for the $40T price tag on her socialist agenda. She says it will save money. What? #sotu
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 16, 2018
Tapper aptly notes that Cortez didn’t answer the question, even when pressed with figures from left-leaning think tanks that note the Left’s staggering cost to their agenda items (via Fox News):
One of the things that we need to realize when we look at something like 'Medicare for all -- 'Medicare for all' would save the American people a very large amount of money," Ocasio-Cortez told CNN's "State of the Union."
The New York Democratic congressional nominee continued: "What we see as well is that these systems are not just 'pie-in-the-sky.' Many of them are accomplished by every modern civilized democracy in the western world."
[…]
"What we need to realize is that these investments are better and they are good for our future," she added. "They are generational investments, not short-term bandaids. They are really profound decisions about who we want to be as a nation, and how we want to act as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world."
Host Jake Tapper noted that according to "left-leaning" analysts, Ocasio-Cortez's plan for universal Medicare would end up costing more than $30 trillion dollars, even after factoring in the sweeping tax hikes that would offset the expense by only roughly $2 trillion.
Oh, it gets worse; the three decade cost projection for Cortez’s band of social policy: $218 trillion. The far Left also has a messaging problem because single-payer means the end of employer-based insurance. When you add that fact into the polling, support for the Cortez-Sanders health care plan goes down the toilet:
The public is divided over a single-payer health care system, with 47 percent favoring such an approach and 46 percent opposing it.
But when supporters are told that all health care costs would be covered under a single-payer system — but that it would eliminate employer plans and that there would be only one government plan — the numbers move to 36 percent favor, 55 percent oppose.
This is democratic socialism, folks. It’s a joke. If you can’t get past simple questions, like how will you pay for it, you’ll lose…unless you’re from the brain dead and appallingly liberal bastions of America where spending other people’s money to pay for pie-in-the-sky social programs that devolved into total crap seems easier. For God’s sake, she couldn’t answer this question properly when the Daily Show pitched it to her…the friggin’ Daily Show. It must be nice being in a position to represent a D+7000 district.
Big thanks to Twitchy for grabbing this.
(H/T Twitchy)