Young Socialist star called for tax cuts as a business owner

by WorldTribune Staff, July 6, 2018

A millennial New York socialist being touted by high-ranking Democrats as the future of the party displayed overt capitalist leanings in the not-too-distant past.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated 10-term incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in New York’s 14th District, advocated for tax cuts when she was running a business of her own, news reports from 2012 reveal.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

While running Brook Avenue Press, an incorporated Bronx-based publishing firm for children’s books, Ocasio-Cortez supported a bill that would provide tax deductions for business start-up costs, arguing that taxes directly impacted her business profits, The Daily Caller noted in a July 5 report.

“You don’t really make a profit in your first year,” Ocasio-Cortez told the now-defunct DNAinfo in 2012. “To get taxed on top of that is a real whammy.”

The 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez “now rails against laws that cut taxes for businesses, such as the tax reform bill signed into law in December, which has been widely praised by small businesses. She claims the tax savings produced by the bill could have paid for health care and free public college for every American,” the Daily Caller said.

Ocasio-Cortez, is a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that calls for the abolishment of capitalism and argues that “private corporate property is not only wrong, but also nonsensical.”

In her time as a business owner, however, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out multiple articles by Paul Graham, an English-born entrepreneur and venture capitalist, according to the report.

“She even gave entrepreneurial talks at Boston University, her alma mater, where she touted her partnership with the Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator designing ‘entrepreneurial curricula for those interested in launching their own enterprises.’ Her primary interests were in ‘entrepreneurship and developing innovative, healthy, enterprising communities for generations to come,’ ” according to her speaker page on Boston University’s website.

The socialist candidate’s “talk of the values of entrepreneurship, profits and lower taxes in 2012 are antithetical to the values she now espouses as a member of the DSA, an organization that marches the streets calling for the abolishment of profit,” the Daily Caller noted.

The New York City DSA’s platform: Abolish profit; abolish prisons; abolish cash bail; abolish borders; abolish ICE.

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign platform: A single-payer health care system, a federal jobs guarantee and housing as a human right which all will be funded through raising taxes on corporations and high-income Americans.


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