Stupid Midwesterners Don’t Understand AOC’s Job-Killing Joy

Amazon was about to deliver thousands of new jobs to New Yorkers, and billions of dollars in tax revenue to the city’s coffers — but don’t you worry, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proudly helped put a stop to all that. In flyover country, we’re a bit confused about why someone might not actually want all those jobs and all those billions for their constituents, and that’s a story Salena Zito has for you today. Her latest is headlined, “The populist sledgehammer kills Amazon jobs that Middle America would love to have.”

Zito spoke with Tito Brown in Youngstown, Ohio, who said that he “can’t imagine driving a perfectly good thing out of a town that hasn’t had a perfectly good thing come its way in a very long time.”

More:

Brown doesn’t really get that. He governs a city with a declining population, a 40 percent poverty rate, and would welcome the opportunity for a project such as Amazon to have considered locating here.

“Oh, any time I can get regional and/or economic growth in my community, I would absolutely want that here,” he said. “It’s budget time.”

But as Zito notes, “Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the leader of the left-wing insurgency within the Democratic Party, slammed the plan in a tweet the moment it was announced in mid-November last year.” Why? Because NYC offered Amazon $3 billion in tax breaks to lure in billions and billions in new tax revenues. I’m not a fan of giving tax breaks to this company but not that company, or allowing tax shelters or credits to this kind of person but not that kind of person. My own outdated, naively republican preferences aside, the people and coffers in NYC had been looking at a real windfall. Had been, until the Permanently Pissed-Off Progs got their way.

Here’s the thing about the Postmodern Left: They don’t give a damn about jobs, wages, or really even any particular government program or Green New Deal or Five-Year Plan, or whatever it is they’re peddling this week. They’re just cynically cashing in on the system they pretend to disparage and despise. (Actually, the despisement is real.)

AOC is an excellent case in point. She enjoyed a privileged upbringing, was awarded a prestigious credential (I refuse to say she “earned a degree”) by a famous school, enjoyed her mid-20s living the bohemian life, saw her chance to become famous — and leapt at it at once.

Courtesy of the voters of her district, AOC has a good-paying job, one with fewer actual responsibilities than her prior bartending gig. Now that she’s on board the Fame Train, she might never have to provide an honest service or produce a useful product for the rest of her life. Even if she’s squeezed out by redistricting after 2020 (assuming her “worries” are well-founded), Ocasio-Cortez looks set for a comfy life of speaking engagements, book tours, and the occasional tongue bath on The View.

And having done all that at a young age, what does she count as her first major political victory? Robbing her friends and neighbors of good-paying jobs of their own. But that doesn’t matter, because (to quote Lenin), “the worse the better” for progressive causes. Saying much but doing nothing to alleviate the misery you’ve helped create is work if you can get it, and it’s just too bad about all those permanently unemployed proles back in Queens.

Multiply this hundreds (at least) of times, with various “progressive” men and woman holding office around the country, and the result is the — dare I say it? — deplorable, irredeemable state of our local, state, and federal governments.