Let us all rejoice, because the lovely Ms. AOC has found $21 trillion under the mattress of the US military, so two-thirds of Medicare for All can be funded even before we start charging premiums. Setting aside minor quibbles like the fact that we haven’t spent $21 trillion on the military in total since the founding of the Republic and that her economic education did not seem to include anything about basic bookkeeping.
She seems somehow to believe that we can squeeze $21 trillion out of a total yearly budget of almost $700 billion. This is the kind of fresh, outside [del]reality[/del] the box thinking that we need in Congress.
Or else it is Ocasio-Cortez floundering in the depths of confident cluelessness, Part XXIII. It’s hard to tell.
The 32 trillion estimate for medicare for all is over 10 years, that’s the first reason for your confusion, and overall spending on healthcare would be about the same. The 21 trillion is from the years 1998 to 2015, so another comprehension error since none of these numbers has to do with a single fiscal year. Not a good look to make basic comprehension errors, one of which is spelled out in your own cite, when trying to criticize someone else’s intelligence.
Yeah, that’s pretty bad. Almost as bad as the actual President of the United States retweeting clearly false information about how much illegal aliens get paid by the US Federal Government each year.
I think her major confusion stems from the fact that the 21b was counted multiple times in transactions, not a total. Either way, it’s a hilariously huge number that she should have caught straight from the gate.
Good for a chuckle. Of course, having a chuckle means we’re “scared” of her, or something like that. But she just keeps spitting these howlers out.
It also has nothing to do with a single year of the budget since both figures, the 32 trillion for medicare for all, and the 21 trillion mentioned, have nothing to do with one years budget. The OP is hilariously wrong considering he is trying to impugn someone else’s intelligence and reading comprehension and he clearly didn’t even understand his own cite.
The entire budget of the Pentagon has only been 18 billion in the last 30 years, so how could this 21 billion be real? Because they’re dollars that have been counted multiple times. So no, we could not fund 2/3 of Medicare for All with an inflated number. It makes no sense. It forces her adherents to insert explanations to fill the gaps.
Which, I think she knows that. Ocasio supporters remind me of certain other politicians’ supporters in that respect.
Sounds like the President also agrees with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez that military spending is too high:
“I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!”
Dude the entire OP was discredited due to basic misunderstandings of his own cite. Her detractors remind me of haters of a certain other politician as well. Now that that politician is out of the spotlight they need to aim their ire at someone else.
There you go again with “keeps spitting these howlers out”, a characterization that you can’t back up. Go ahead: show me 10 of these “howlers” that Miss O-C “keeps spitting”.
How hard is it really to add a few zeros to the next batch of bills to be printed? If socialism does take hold in the US how bad can zoo donkey stew be?
It’s not real, that’s the point. But there is something else here also - you seem to be indicating that counting something multiple times is inappropriate. But that’s not right either. If a company has interfund transfers of $1.00 that is due to accounting error, then it makes sense to describe that as an error of $1. If that same transaction happens one trillion times back and forth between the same funds, it is accurate to say that accounting errors resulted in $1T of transactions erroneously. It’s not an inappropriate double counting inflating the magnitude of the error. Now it could be clarified even further, but a problem that results in $1 of transactions a single time is much less severe than one that happens a trillion times.
There was never any indication that this was real dollars that could be used. A different way to phrase the same criticism would be something like, “the magnitude of the accounting errors are so large, that if they were actually real we could use that money to buy another country.” It’s a way to convey the ginormity of the accounting errors.
There’s plenty to criticize AOC over. This is not one of those things.