(Headline USA) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., admitted this weekend that the U.S. economy is in “crisis,” contradicting President Joe Biden’s claims that his economic agenda is working.
“Our economy is in a special kind of crisis. Our whole economy is in a special kind of crisis,” the “Squad” member said at a union rally in Missouri on Sunday, according to Fox News.
Ocasio–Cortez went on to blast Washington elites who are out of touch with blue-collar workers.
“Now if you ask a Washington insider or a Wall Street analyst, they will tell you, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,'” she said.
“They’ll say, ‘Look at GDP. Look at the growth rate.’ They’ll say, ‘Look at job numbers. How are we in a crisis?’” she continued. “And that’s an easy thing to say for someone who primarily experiences this economy on paper—who aren’t [sic] choosing between childcare and work, or medicine and rent.”
The New York Democrat said workers “feel the economy in the callouses of our hands” and know that it is failing them.
Ocasio–Cortez’s comments stood in stark contrast to Biden’s re-election pitch, which has revolved largely around his “Bidenomics” agenda.
“Costs are going down,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed, without evidence, earlier this month. “When you think about inflation. When you think about wages going up. That is Bidenomics.”
Economic experts will note that the across-the-board spike in wages actually contributes to the vicious cycle of inflation by forcing an increase in labor costs that get passed on to consumers on top of the previous increases in overhead due to factors such as supply shortages, energy hikes and higher taxes inflicted by the Biden administration.
A Fox News poll in August found that 52% of Americans felt that Biden has made the economy worse, while 25% claimed he had made it better.
When pressed on this poll, Jean-Pierre insisted the polls “don’t show everything” and blamed the pandemic, which ended two years ago, for lingering inflation and high costs.
“Americans are coming out of a pandemic,” she said. “We are dealing with a lot when you think about the economy. But here’s the thing, this is a president who has spent the last two years turning the economy around.”
When convenient, the Biden administration has routinely used the pandemic as a means to give itself more credit than it deserves, such as faulting the prior Trump administration for the job losses and claiming that the resulting job growth that came in the pandemic’s aftermath was all due to Biden’s policies.
