AOC Defends Roll in Scaring Amazon Away from New York

Alexandria Occasio Cortez bragged about driving Amazon out of New York City, Tuesday, and costing the city thousands of jobs.

Frankly, the knee-jerk reaction assuming that I “don’t understand” how tax giveaways to corps work is disappointing.

No, it’s not possible that I could come to a different conclusion. The debate *must* be over my intelligence & understanding, instead of the merits of the deal.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 19, 2019

Fox News reports:

The freshman Democratic New York congresswoman has faced days of criticism from normally friendly media voices and fellow Democrats over her role in Amazon’s decision to pull back from building a $2.5 billion campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens.

Amazon had cited the opposition of “a number of state and local politicians” in its decision to abandon the plans. Ocasio-Cortez and others at the local level had pointed to incentives such as a $2.5 billion in tax breaks as a reason for their opposition.

“If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to,” Ocasio-Cortez said last week.

Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed back on that claim on Sunday. Even as he slammed Amazon for its decision, the mayor said critics wrongly suggested that tax breaks represented money that could be spent on other things. He said it wasn’t “money you had over here. And it was going over there.”