New York progressive firebrand Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have graduated from Boston University with a double major in international relations and economics, but one of her latest tweets suggests that she might have slept through much of the economics part.
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez must have believed she had a real zinger against Republicans when she retweeted a stat from the GOP’s official Twitter account citing a recent statistic regarding how many people are currently living paycheck to paycheck in President Joe Biden’s America.
The GOP’s tweet read, “60% of workers report living paycheck-to-paycheck.”
60% of workers report living paycheck-to-paycheck
— GOP (@GOP) December 19, 2022
AOC captioned her retweet with a statement that she presumably immediately regretted as she was relentlessly mocked for someone who holds an economics degree and graduated cum laude from a prestigious university, as Snopes previously confirmed.
“And yet y’all still voted against raising the minimum wage,” AOC replied.
And yet y’all still voted against raising the minimum wage https://t.co/tFkTHf2OAO
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 19, 2022
“Raising the minimum wage just makes everything else MORE expensive. Meaning it enhances daily life ZERO. Therefore it amounts to absolutely nothing except tricking voters to vote for you,” Graham Allen tweeted in response.
Raising the minimum wage just makes everything else MORE expensive. Meaning it enhances daily life ZERO. Therefore it amounts to absolutely nothing except tricking voters to vote for you.
— Graham Allen (@GrahamAllen_1) December 19, 2022
However, even better than the hilarious responses to her misinformed, low IQ reply to the GOP, she was brutally fact-checked thanks to Elon Musk expanding the use of the “Community Notes” addendums to tweets that need more context and explanation, something that Twitter users generally never witnessed happened against people like AOC under Twitter’s old management.
One of the many Community Notes sources pointed out that a Deseret News piece reported that it’s not only minimum wage workers currently living paycheck to paycheck, noting that record-setting inflation has caused higher earners to fall back to living that way due to shrinking or vanishing savings accounts.
Additionally, the Community Notes on AOC’s tweet also pointed to a Forbes explainer that explains how high inflation can completely negate wage growth. It’s a simple concept: if you received a 5 percent raise and inflation is at 8 percent, it’s a wage reduction.
How Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand such basic concepts is beyond bizarre.
But one could suspect that she does, in fact, know this. That information is likely taught at Boston University on day one. The reality is that Democrats like AOC have published that level of misinformation for years, unchecked.
She knows that many of her uneducated or unaware social media followers will take a quip like that and run with it as nothing less than fact, no questions asked. That’s been the status quo for a long time, and it’s how she panders to her base.
Not on Musk’s watch.
The new Twitter owner revamped the Community Notes section in the early weeks of taking over Twitter, and it’s coming in quite handy as far as acting as a real-time fact-checking tool for dishonest politicians like AOC and others who became accustomed to making their own rules and facts.
Thank goodness we have a reliable way to check these lying politicians.
