The total amount of money spent on national defense from 1940 to 2018 is $18 trillion. Therefore, it’s quite easy to project that $21 trillion is more than this country has spent on defense in its entire history. See table 3.1 here: Historical Tables | OMB | The White House
But agreed that the issue here is counting money multiple times, like if you put a $20 bill in your pocket in the morning, but don’t spend it, and put the same $20 bill on your nightstand before turning in, you have executed $40 in transactions.
Disagreed. She wrote: "$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.”
$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T.
That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon."
When someone writes that something “could have been funded already” then it’s an open-and-shut case that she thought the $21 trillion has purchasing power, and is not simply a abstract measurement that happens to use a dollar sign.
Come on, the entire OP was based on BS and failure to even read his own cite. He was talking about yearly budgets and mocking her for it when he was totally wrong about his own cite! Where in his own cite did it say anything about 32 or 21 trillion in a single year.
Just because it fit your narrative that AOC is an airhead it doesn’t make it valid. You claim that you are not afraid of her, but your obession is very telling. Have you made any remarks about any other freshman representatives? Even one? You have a singular focus, but I’m sure you’ll just say that she’s making you focus on her or something like that.
No worries, as long as you use this as a learning opportunity, and don’t criticize people for making far less egregious math errors than you just made, we’re all cool!
I think everyone (left and right wing) has a tendency to have a double standard of fiscal largesse for spending they like, and fiscal restraint for spending they don’t like. Think the husband who spends hundreds of dollars on fishing gear but flips out if his wife buys a $95 dress.
But I’m reminded of the quote from the movie* Independence Day* where the president asks how these secret alien UFO programs are paid for and someone comments, “You don’t think the government really spends $600 on a hammer, do you?” Is this fraud, waste, or also black-budget stuff?
It seems more like a rhetorical device, like my example above with buying a country. YMMV. I guess I read it that way because that makes much more sense to me.
I’ve been looking for any posts where certain posters called out the President for retweeting ridiculously incorrect information about money and illegal immigrants. Surprise, surprise, not much was found.
Funnily enough, I’d forgive Cortez for a slip up like that, saying blillion when she might have meant trillion. If the numbers were otherwise accurate, then it would be quite clear it was misspeak.
But gaffes that demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue being talked about? That’s cause for concern. Or at the very least, a chuckle.
You mean like the OP, that you’ve gleefully jumped on board with because it seemed to fit your preconceived narrative, even though it demonstrates complete misunderstanding of the issue, and even of his own cite? I don’t see why you are clinging so hard to be on team OP when he completely faceplanted on reading and understanding his own cite. I’d be embarrased at this point, but that’s me.
Then by all means explain the issue. How does the Pentagon pay for two-thirds of Medicare for All, which is $21 trillion, on a yearly budget of almost $700 billion? Show your work.
I believe the $32 trillion is over ten years. OK, 10*700 billion - X = 21 trillion. Solve for X.
There’s an underlying issue of “we could afford nice things if we wanted to,” but reading her tweet, it is just wrong on the face of it.
Now, she could be angling for the Democratic contender to be “taken seriously but not literally,” which if that is her intention, she ends up in rather awful company.
