‘I lived in the New York area for most of my life but I started being unable to afford it…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) If Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez‘s ambitiously spendthrift Green New Deal were ever to take effect, adding trillions in debt to the economy, it is estimated that the annual cost would be the equivalent $65,000 per every American.
That is likely to earn her a talking to from her mom, Blanca Ocasio–Cortez, who was forced to flee the Empire State’s excessive taxes for the more affordable Eustis, Fla., in the Orlando suburbs.
Blanca bought an 860-square-foot house for $87,000 in December 2016 and moved in, along with her own mother, Clotilde, and a rescue dog named Tammy.
“I lived in the New York area for most of my life but I started being unable to afford it,” the widowed mother of two told the Daily Mail in a profile published Monday.
With help from family members, she and her husband, Sergio, had moved from an apartment in The Bronx to a single-family home in the Westchester County neighborhood of Yorktown Heights shortly after 29-year-old Alexandria’s birth.
But when Sergio, a small-business owner, died of lung cancer in 2008, she struggled to make ends meet.
“After my husband died the family went through tough times,” Blanca said. “I was cleaning houses in the morning and working as a secretary in the afternoon.”
Once Alexandria and her 26-year-old brother, Gabriel, left for college, heading south was a no-brainer.
“I was paying $10,000 a year in real estate taxes up north. I’m paying $600 a year in Florida,” Blanca said. “It’s stress-free down here.”
However, BOC thought her Trump-supporting neighbors (prior to the article) may have had no idea who she was. “‘I don’t like the limelight for myself and my family,” she said. “But it seems that God played quite a joke on me with this politics stuff.”
Back in New York, her daughter has done little to ease the pain of high taxes.
A tweet from Alexandria criticizing Amazon‘s plan to set up shop there in return for $3 billion in tax incentives caused the megalithic corporation to pull out of the deal, costing upward of 25,000 jobs.
Even before that, New York was facing a more than $2 billion budget crunch, with many wealthy citizens turning into tax refugees after federal reforms in 2017 set a cap on state and local deductions.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed President Donald Trump for the shortfall. But by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share, Trump’s tax overhaul might have won favor with the Ocasio–Cortez family on one level.
That’s not to say they share the same outlook on spending. The socialist-loving congresswoman not only wrote and co-sponsored the Green New Deal bill, but she also has advocated for other massive entitlement programs, including free college tuition and healthcare for all.
She has said the spending initiatives could be funded in the same way as the wars and bailouts of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, by running up deficits and printing additional money. However, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was one of many who were skeptical of the plan.
“The idea that deficits don’t matter for countries that can borrow in their own currency I think is just wrong,” Powell said.