Ocasio-Cortez: American Workers Should Be 'Excited' to Lose Their Jobs
Claims losing jobs to robots is a good thing, calls for 90% taxes on corporations
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Radical socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says American workers should be "excited" about losing their jobs to robots after "being automated out of work."
During a talk at the left-leaning South by Southwest Conference & Festival in Austin, Texas on Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez also called for 90% taxes on corporations.
The remarks were among a number of controversial statements made by the Democratic socialist during the event, where she also said America was in a state of "garbage" and suggested that former President Ronald Reagan was a racist.
"We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work," AOC declared.
"We should not feel nervous about, you know, the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore."
"We should be excited by that," Ocasio-Cortez continued.
"But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die, and that is at its core a problem.
"And so there are a lot of different solutions— a lot of different proposed, uh, ideas about how we go about that."
Ocasio-Cortez then seemed to support the idea put forward by Bill Gates of "taxing robots at 90 percent," explaining: "what that means— what he’s really talking about is taxing corporations at 90 percent, um, but it’s easier to say tax a robot."
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According to the Daily Wire, Ocasio-Cortez's comments about how "its a core problem" that people should have to work in order to live goes back to her far-left Green New Deal, which stated that it would provide "Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work."
Her remarks that people should not be worried about losing their jobs to automation is absurd, as recent reports predict that tens of millions of Americans will be jobless in the coming decades due to automation.
Polling from Pew Research has found that approximately 85% of American "support restricting workforce automation to jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans to do, including 47% who support the idea strongly."
"Over the next 13 years, the rising tide of automation will force as many as 70 million workers in the United States to find another way to make money, a new study from the global consultancy McKinsey predicts," The Washington Post reported.
"That means nearly a third of the American workforce could face the need to pick up new skills or enter different fields in the near future," said the report's co-author, Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute who studies business and economics.
AOC at SXSW (03/09):
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 10, 2019
-People should be “excited” about “being automated out of work”
-“We live in a society where if you don’t have a job you are left to die and that is at its core a problem”
-Supports taxing corporations at 90%
-The world is “approaching infinite resources” pic.twitter.com/c5yZjMHPnf
Ocasio-Cortez, who drew big crowds, was also the subject of criticism at the event as former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz slammed her Green New Deal.
"Going back to the Green New Deal, in the Green New Deal there is a proposal that says that by 2030 every building in America is going to be transformed to clean energy," Schultz said.
"Now, that's a well-intentioned idea but it's never going to happen.
"Let’s propose things that are true, that are honest, that are sincere, and that are realistic."
"There's nothing free in America," Schultz continued.
"So these proposals about Medicare for all, and free college, and a government job for everybody, that is not free.
"So someone is going to have to pay for that and that means that taxes for everyone is going to have to go up or someone's going to have to wave a magic wand and do something that doesn't exist but that has to be paid for by somebody and the difficulty in trying to pay for any of that is we're sitting with twenty-two trillion dollars of debt that has to be addressed."
