CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper, one of the last reliable MSM reporters, got socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all tongue-tied when he asked her plain and simple how she would pay for her $40 trillion platform. From Mediaite:
“Your platform has called for various new programs including Medicare-for-all, housing as a federal right, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, canceling all student loan debt,” said Tapper, listing a few of the items the New York candidate has promised to pursue. “According to nonpartisan and left-leaning studies friendly to your cause including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or the Tax Policy Center, the overall price tag is more than $40 trillion in the next decade.”“You recently said in an interview that increasing taxes on the very wealthy, plus an increased corporate tax rate would make $2 trillion over the next ten years,” Tapper continued. “So where is the other $38 trillion going to come from?”
First of all, Tapper did not make up those numbers out of thin air. Even Vox admitted that the platform costs too much. That publication used left-leaning and nonpartisan organizations that show the platform costs around $42.5 trillion.
Medicare for All alone costs $32 trillion.
So how would Ocasio-Cortez pay for it? Mediate continues:
“One of the things 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,” replied Ocasio-Cortez. “And what we see as well is that these systems are not just pie-in-the-sky. They are, many of them are accomplished by every modern civilized democracy in the western world. The United Kingdom has a form of single payer health care. Canada, France, Germany. What we need to realize s that these investments are better and they are good for our future.”“These are generational investments,” she added. “So that not just, they are not short-term band-aids but 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.”
Tapper continued to press Ocasio-Cortez and pointed out that the taxes she mentioned only covered two points in the platform. How did she reply? Same:
Ocasio-Cortez then told the story of how individuals she spoke to in New York didn’t have insurance, and other stories about how her generation doesn’t buy cars.“What this is, is a broader agenda. We do know and acknowledge that there are political realities. They don’t always happen with just the wave of a wand, but we can work to make these things happen,” she said. “In fact, when you look at the economic activity that it spurs — for example, if you look at my generation, millennials, the amount of economic activity that we do not engage in. The fact that we delay purchasing homes, that we don’t participate in the economy in purchasing cars etc. as fully as possible, is a cost.”“It is a externality, if you will, of unprecedented amounts of student loan debt,” she concluded somewhat cryptically.
Tapper responded by saying that he was “not going to get an answer for the other thirty-eight trillion dollars,” but told Ocasio-Cortez that the show will have her on again and hopefully she will have an answer then.
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