Ocasio-Cortez ruffles Congress with crusade to pay W.H. interns ‘living wage’ – using taxpayer money, of course

Though socialist congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earned immediate praise from the left this week when she announced that she intends to pay her congressional interns, others responded more critically by pointing out that she doesn’t plan to pay them with her own money.

“Time to walk the walk. Very few members of Congress actually pay their interns. We will be one of them,” she tweeted Tuesday in response to a report confirming she intends to pay her interns $15+/hour.

Look:

While this seems like an example of her abiding by her own socialist-light principles, many were quick to note that she intends to pay her interns via money drawn from a congressional budgetary fund.

In a spending bill signed earlier this year, Congress designated $8.8 million for House intern pay and $5 million for Senate intern pay. That means that every House representative will receive $20,000 for interns starting next year. Ocasio-Cortez admitted as much in a tweet Wednesday.

“The fund is $20,000 per member for interns (we can have 4 interns max at a time – DC & district),” she wrote as criticism against her began mounting. “That’s $20k for 4 people if you want full staff, anything more l requires MRA supplementation.”

Look:

The congresswoman-elect and her adoring supporters believe her decision to pay her interns proves she’s not a hypocrite, but others say otherwise given the existence of the intern fund.

They argue that it’s easy to live by socialist principles when you use other people’s money to pay for your socialist expenditures. It’s much harder to use your own money.

Were Ocasio-Cortez a business owner — versus a congresswoman-elect whose salary and job will be funded entirely by the government — she’d likely not be as generous with her money.

Twitter users agree:

Conservatives oppose Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist policies because they’re designed to snatch wealth from those who’ve earned it and redistribute the money to the less fortunate via minimum wage increases, tax hikes and other economically disastrous policies.

The number one criticism of these policies has been that the people advocating for them have no business experience. In some cases they’ve never even held a real job. And more often than not the same people pushing for wealth redistribution are hoarders who refuse to share their own money.

Ocasio-Cortez is quick to slam Republicans for not supporting a minimum wage hike of $15/hour. But a closer look at a recent report shows her anger would be better suited aimed at her Democrat colleagues.

A report last year found that a significantly higher percentage of free market Republicans in Congress pay their interns versus their socialism-loving Democrat peers.

“A report in 2017 from nonprofit group Pay Our Interns found that in the House, just 8% of Republicans and 3.6% of Democrats pay interns. It found that in the Senate, 51% of Republicans and 31% of Democrats pay their interns,” Business Insider notes.

Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet is thought to be the catalyst behind an update Chuck Schumer made (shortly after her tweet) about a paid intern position.

It’s often been argued that conservatives would take the left’s pro-socialist arguments more seriously if Democrats would live by their own standards. But they rarely do. And that includes Ocasio-Cortez’s mentor, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Despite being one of the loudest proponents of wealth distribution, Sanders owns multiple homes all worth over $500,000 each and yet is reportedly known to be a stingy tipper.

Judging by both Ocasio-Cortez’s refusal to pay her interns with her own money and her reported spending habits, chances are high she too is a lousy tipper.

In fact, according to social media users, she really is a lousy tipper:

Their claims are correct: During her stint as a bartender prior to running for Congress, the congresswoman-elected reportedly tried to stiff waitresses of their tips.

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Vivek Saxena

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