I see WaPo caught Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), arguably the favorite of the progressives in Congress these days, in a blunder:
Ocasio-Cortez claimed on Twitter that $21 trillion in “Pentagon accounting errors” could have paid for 66 percent of the Medicare-for-all proposal. Her tweet references an article in the Nation, a left-leaning magazine. The specific line about the missing $21 trillion comes from research by Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. …
Skidmore’s paper clearly talks about Pentagon “assets” and “liabilities.” This key distinction was duly noted in the Nation article that Ocasio-Cortez referenced on Twitter.
To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion.
But it did not appear in her tweet, which clearly implied that the $21 trillion could have been used to pay for 66 percent of the $32 trillion in estimated Medicare-for-All costs.
“To clarify, this is to say that we only demand fiscal details [with health and education], rarely elsewhere,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a follow-up tweet.
“The point, I think, was more about how we care so little about the ‘how do you pay for it’ when we are talking about war and military spending,” her spokesman wrote in an email. “It’s only when we are talking about investing in the physical and economic well-being of our citizenry that we become concerned with the price tags.”
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that’ll dent her credibility, between getting things wrong, and then frantically backfilling. In fact, the Pentagon undergoing an audit indicates we’re also paying attention to the financial details, even though this is the first such audit, so I suspect the conservatives will just use the explanatory e-mail from her spokesman as another bit of ammunition to discredit the Representative-elect.
Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez needs to get her ducks in a row before trying to comment on just about anything. Right now she’s a leading target, and she has to be flawless or risk becoming irrelevant.
