On Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Grow Yucca in NYC) publicly accepted the nomination to co-chair a climate change task force for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign. Desperate to bring disaffected Bernie Bros around to voting for Joe, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have partnered with Sen. Bernie Sanders (S-USSR) to launch “Unity” task forces. AOC, as the architect of the radical and unworkable government takeover of the economy known as the “Green New Deal,” is leading the Climate Change Unity Task Force.
“After conferring w/ grassroots activists and climate allies, I am accepting [Bernie Sanders]’ nomination to co-chair the Climate Change Unity Task Force with [former Secretary of State John Kerry],” AOC announced on Twitter. “Our planet is dangerously imperiled, and wherever there are decisions made, the people must have a voice.”
After conferring w/ grassroots activists and climate allies, I am accepting @BernieSanders’ nomination to co-chair the Climate Change Unity Task Force with Sec. @JohnKerry.
Our planet is dangerously imperiled, and wherever there are decisions made, the people must have a voice. https://t.co/xCzEruOwM1
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 13, 2020
The Green New Deal is not really about giving the “people” a “voice,” of course. In fact, according to AOC’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, the Green New Deal “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.”
“We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” Chakrabarti told The Washington Post last July.
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Indeed, AOC’s climate overhaul would change the entire economy. According to an American Action Forum estimate, it would cost a whopping $93 trillion. Taxing the rich would not even come close to footing the bill for these programs, according to a Heritage Foundation study. Even assuming the economy would keep humming along and workers would still work with their wages confiscated, a 100 percent income tax on all incomes above $200,000 and a confiscation of all corporate profits would still fall $13.2 trillion short of paying for the low estimate of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. That number is based on the $48 trillion (close to the PJ Media analysis of $49.109 trillion over ten years) low-end estimate. This fanciful number is still $57.8 trillion short of the American Action Forum estimate.
These costs seem abstract and many Americans’ eyes may glaze over when hearing about trillions of dollars and ballooning federal deficits. A CEI/Power the Future study made the cost more concrete: It found that the Green New Deal would cost the average American family $250,000 in the first five years.
All this to ostensibly stave off a long-predicted climate crisis that stubbornly fails to occur. From concrete temperature claims to the prophecy of the Maldives sinking beneath the waves (2018 came and went, but the Maldives are still here), to a prediction of nuclear war by 2020, climate alarmists have botched so many predictions, it’s hard to keep track.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Joe Biden from claiming that the coronavirus is a “wake-up call” on climate change — as if carbon emissions, rather than a Wuhan laboratory experimenting on bat coronaviruses or a Chinese Communist Party fighting to cover it up, were the real culprit behind the pandemic.
Biden made some very radical proposals to ban various forms of oil and gas production — “No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.” — and then claimed he wouldn’t eliminate whole industries that employ over a million U.S. workers in crucial swing states. Uh huh. We totally believe you, Uncle Joe.
AOC is even more radical than Joe Biden, but her leadership on this climate change task force only underscores the fact that a Biden administration would take America down a hard-left turn towards socialism.
The other task forces also reveal Biden’s true agenda. While the former vice president ran against Sanders’ socialized medicine plan, Medicare for All, during the primary, his health care task force will be co-chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who avidly supports Medicare for All — and who said Democrats fear giving up “leverage” when working on coronavirus relief bills. His criminal justice reform task force includes none other than Obama “wingman,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, the only A.G. in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress over the Fast & Furious gun-walking scandal.
As for AOC, she claims to be a champion of science on the supposed climate crisis, but she has suggested immigrants in New York City should grow tropical plants like yucca — to stick it to colonialism, or something. She condemned agricultural practices driven by *ahem* science as a “colonial approach to environmentalism.”
So yeah, her overhaul of the economy is going to work just perfectly. How dare you suggest otherwise.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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