New York’s ‘Squad Member’ Ocasio-Cortez Again Confuses Facts

The liberal from the Big Apple somehow claimed that 'many people' will 'starve' due to the Trump administration's new rule on food stamps

By David Kamioner | December 6, 2019

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), better known as AOC, claimed that a recent Trump administration action on food stamps would have meant starvation for her and her family when she was in college.

Here’s her tweet from Thursday in which she made this dubious claim.

The Daily Signal, a publication of the conservative Heritage Foundation, set her straight in its own tweet.

Among other points, it noted that her claim “is simply not true.”

Others made the same point in their tweets.

Given that the former bartender, a member of Congress for about a year, has derided “facts” as a basis for reasoning, this is another example of those pesky facts getting in the way of her conclusions.

But that didn’t stop her political allies from rushing to also call out the Trump administration.

Said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), “This administration is out of touch with families who are struggling to make ends meet by working seasonal jobs or part-time jobs with unreliable hours,” according to the Associated Press.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also criticized the administration’s new move in a public statement, “Instead of combating food insecurity for millions, connecting workers to good-paying jobs or addressing income inequality, the administration is inflicting their draconian rule on millions of Americans across the nation who face the highest barriers to employment and economic stability.”

The Trump administration fought back clearly and firmly.

“We’re taking action to reform our SNAP [food stamp] program in order to restore the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population and be respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program,” as Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters on Wednesday.

“Americans are generous people who believe it is their responsibility to help their fellow citizens when they encounter a difficult stretch. That’s the commitment behind SNAP, but, like other welfare programs, it was never intended to be a way of life,” he also said.

The program merely restores many of the welfare-to-work provisions of the Clinton administration’s 1996 welfare reform legislation.

Many of those measures had been diminished or abolished altogether by the Obama administration.

By any accounting, multigenerational welfare dependency is a plague on this country and especially on its poorest citizens.

The consistent reliance on what is supposed to be a temporary aid program has cast inner-city families and rural communities into the abyss of relying on government — not their own efforts — for daily sustenance.

It also drains the coffers of the taxpayer-funded social safety net of funding that could be used for other, more deserving projects.

The United States has always been a compassionate country. Our social legislation reflects that.

However, it is not compassionate to sentence families to the deadening effects of government dependency.

It is, in reality, shortsighted and cruel.

Even the Democrats should know better.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette.com:
Rush Limbaugh: ‘Pelosi Invokes Her Catholicism on Everything but Abortion’
Biden on the Hot Seat: How Many More Gaffes Does He Need to Commit Before He’s Out?
Trump Dares Pelosi and the Democrats to Impeach Him

Mentioned in this article: