Back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Paul Krugman decided to jump on the “we need to defend AOC” bandwagon with this Tweet:
Their insecurity in the face of a bright, charismatic woman of color is spectacular. I particularly like the constant claims that she's stupid when, let's face it, the average GOP House member knows as much about policy as the average house pet. https://t.co/JzK4665oRy
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 3, 2018
I think he misspelled vapid and vacuous.
She’s not charismatic. She’s ran on a platform of promising people free stuff against a Democrat who barely phoned in his opposition to her in a primary in a district where people would vote for a dead dog before they voted for a Republican.
A quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln goes “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
Every Tweet of her removes more doubt.
Also, “the Republicans don’t know much either” isn’t a good defense of AOC knowing nothing.
But what do you expect of a guy taken to task by Dilbert.
You want to know why Republicans pick on her. It’s not insecurity, it is to point out just how shallow her thoughts are, in the hopes that people who are not dyed-in-the-wool Leftists see how ridiculous is the elevation of AOC as the new face of the Democrat party.
Here is a perfect example of that:
It is unjust for Congress to budget a living wage for ourselves, yet rely on unpaid interns & underpaid overworked staff just bc Republicans want to make a statement about “fiscal responsibility.”
If that’s the case, they can cut down on staff to pay them well. Or raise the MRA.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 3, 2018
According to AOC, Congress budget a living wage for itself.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a salary of $174,000/year puts her in the to 97% of earners and in the 98% for people her age.
According to MIT a living wage for a single person (AOC isn’t married) is $17.02/hr or $34,000/year in Washington DC.
She will make more than five times a living wage.
This is typical for a socialist leader. She will be in the top 3% of earners but never mind that, someone else has to pay more so she can be generous with goverment money.
She will make more than my wife and I combined to say stupid shit on Twitter and occasionally vote for something she doesn’t understand, but will have the audacity to lecture us about being bad people for not wanting to pay more in taxes.
If the Left doesn’t understand why this rubs some people the wrong way, any reconciliation between the Left and Right is impossible.
Grrr… buggered up my messenger thingy.
Unintended Consequences appears to be available and taking preorders!
https://stlccw.com/product/unintended-consequences-is-back-in-softcover/
Same reason they stuck up for obammy. Think about it
The usual (& lazy) “let’s try to make this about RACISM!” is kind of stupid, as the Right jumped all over a cishet white Democrat for the “we will nuke you!” tweets.
Woman of “color?” Boy they sure like to throw that around. Like the word “privilege” only applies to a certain demographic, but not to everyone else. I’m 1/1024th Indian. Do I get privilege too?
Wait til she gets that first paycheck and half of it is “deducted” for taxes. I’ll bet I can hear her scream in Texas without the aide of electronic means.
Don’t worry. Somehow Occasional-Cortex will spin it as somehow being unfair and wrong because she’s really not one of the top 3%… but will still be advocating for more and higher taxes for everyone else.
Krugman — the guy who predicted a stock market crash starting with the day after Trump’s election and ending — probably never. That tells you all you need to know.
I find Wolfers’ original tweet more interesting than Krugman’s.
I swapped around a few words, and the tweet is just as valid:
“It’s just astonishing how much time and effort the entire Democrat establishment has put into deconstructing every sentence @TheRealDonaldTrump says, even as they nod their heads silently at every nonsensical utterance coming out of @Ocasio2018.”
Look, an equally valid statement.
I also suspect that Occasional-Cortex will be every bit as bad about using “unpaid interns & underpaid overworked staff” as every other national level Democratic politician. If not worse.
When this is pointed out in a year or two, she’ll make some lame excuse about how someone else should be paying her staff, not her. That it’s unfair she has to use her own money to pay people!
There are rules on Congressional staff. Each member of Congress is limited to 18 full time staff and 4 part time staff. Staff salaries are paid for by a budget each Congressperson gets. Paid internships are more regulated because they partially overlap with staff. Unpaid interns are not.
A Congressperson could include intern salaries into their office budget, but that eats into the limits on staff. By using unpaid interns, Congresspeople can skirt the rules on staff. It also blurs the lines on Congressional duties and campaign duties, which for paid staff is very firm.
Pretty much Congress uses unpaid interns to cheat and work around the rules.
AOC will learn this soon enough which is why once she gets into the swing of the office, this issue will die for her.
You know the saying about a stopped watch being right twice a day? Krugman is like a stopped calendar. He’s right once a year. If that.
Seriously: whatever way he says to bet, bet the opposite. As an Austrian/real money-type guy, I don’t think much of Keynesians like him to start with, but he’s bad for a Keynesian. If that Nobel prize was worth a sh*t, why’s he working for a newspaper and not in power in the Federal Reserve system somewhere? Yeah, right, I know: instead of being in place to make big bucks he wants to influence the public.
Media: the last refuge of a con man.
Talk about influencing the public, you can do way more damage in the fed than in a newspaper!