After a week where her (albeit incredibly charming) dancing has overshadowed our chance to watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually do her job as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, she’s now taken the weekend to prove she’s also better at Twitter than us.
Louisiana representative and house minority whip Steve Scalise tweeted a conservative blog’s criticism of a 60 Minutes interview in which she outlined her Green New Deal plan to address climate change, and Ocasio-Cortez was right there with the comeback, tweeting, “You’re the GOP Minority Whip. How do you not know how marginal tax rates work?”
She went on to accuse Republicans of being rented out by corporations: “Oh that’s right, almost forgot: GOP works for the corporate CEOs showering themselves in multi-million bonuses; not the actual working people whose wages + healthcare they’re ripping off for profit.”
This week the dancing video combined with the commentary of professional TV yellers who like to imply that young women are, by nature, not very smart, seems like a concerted effort to discredit any serious opinions Ocasio-Cortez has and write off the Green New Deal proposal as pie-in-the sky Democrat nonsense. But as The New York Times points out, Ocasio-Cortez is the one who knows her history:
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.
She also shut that “little girl” shit down beautifully: