New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outwardly admitted a truth her leftist comrades normally keep quiet: Democrats think government spending is the only answer to every problem.
On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez touted her fundraising efforts that yielded over $1 million for people suffering financial hardship in her district because of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, QNS reported.
“Every single one of us, in one way or another, has been impacted by COVID-19,” she said. “We’re trying to step up where the federal government is not acting.”
“I’m honored to say we’ve exceeded our goal of fundraising $1 million thanks to everyday people, who pitched in a $17 average donation, to provide direct relief for community groups and advocacy organizations serving NY-14 constituents on the frontline,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
The money raised reportedly will help more than three dozen community groups to provide COVID-19 relief — including food and financial assistance — directly to the needy.
The congresswoman is also working on another initiative to raise $3,000 per week to hire street vendors to provide fresh produce for needy families, helping with both economic and food relief needs.
Normally, this would be good news about the charitable hearts of Americans helping one another through tough times.
But for Ocasio-Cortez, such an outpouring is deeply problematic.
“As federal response continues to be insufficient,” she lamented Friday on Twitter, “our supporters have been stepping up to help families ourselves.
“I’m proud to announce that #TeamAOC has raised over *$1 million* in direct aid to people – all from small dollar, grassroots donations.”
“This direct aid has benefited over 40 diff efforts, from food distribution w @hungrymonknyc to helping immigrant families excluded from the CARES Act w/ @NYSYLC & @VendorPower,” she wrote of the organizations and people who would receive the help.
“In a just society, none of this would be necessary,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But we’ll do everything we can until we get there.”
In making her case, she first took a swipe at the federal government before launching into the news about a seven-figure donation haul, collected $17 at a time on average, per her own statement to QNS.
Ocasio-Cortez should have concluded that an inept government is worse at helping her local constituents than their own neighbors, but instead she just resented that charity was necessary at all, hoping instead for forced “donations” via taxpayer dollars.
What’s more, she used the same phrase — A Just Society — to name her proposed legislation that seeks, among other leftist policies, to ensure government goodies are doled out to convicts and illegal aliens, according to The New York Times.
Apparently, in AOC’s world, a society in which the government takes money by force to redistribute to lawbreakers is preferable to a country of altruistic citizens sharing from their own pockets to help their fellow human beings.
This isn’t the first time Ocasio-Cortez has expressed a desire to seize Americans’ cash rather than encourage charitable giving.
When tech mogul Bill Gates was attempting to encourage other billionaires to donate to fight COVID-19, she sarcastically suggested they pay could send their money to the IRS, assuming — as the left always does — that the government is more capable of spending money than the private citizens who earn it.
“If only there were some public fund billionaires could pay into along with everyone else that helps fund our infrastructure, hospitals, and public systems all at once,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted May 13.
“It could even be a modest % of what they earn every year. We could have an agency collect it and everything.”
That’s because the underpinnings of her democratic socialist viewpoint put the government, rather than any private endeavor, at the center of everyone’s lives as the default for problem-solving.
But Ocasio-Cortez isn’t known for her keen insight, as evidenced by her Green New Deal proposal, which included abolishing air travel, and her view of looters as starving people stealing bread (and apparently also U-Hauls full of jewelry).
The only thing AOC unintentionally got right in both criticisms is that the government is woefully inept, but instead of encouraging more money to flow through bloated, wasteful, slothful bureaucracies, she should see the existence of charity among normal citizens and billionaires alike as a better alternative.
People on both the left and right instinctively recognize that their duty to one another in their own communities comes first, but Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk are so smitten with wealth redistribution they can’t see solutions that don’t involve funneling funds through Washington first.
In addition, Americans should have the power to choose to whom and what causes they will donate rather than being compelled to send their money to the spendthrifts in government, who use it for things such as sex changes for convicts and Black Lives Matter murals.
For Ocasio-Cortez and leftists in general, their dystopian view of society is that the poor would be marginalized and starved but for the benevolence of government, ignoring that America is the most generous country in the world and that most people are willing to help one another.
But as is typical with leftists, when faced with evidence of government failure and individual generosity, Ocasio-Cortez refused to see reality.
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