AOC Can’t Do Read Or Do Math: Pentagon Edition

The Socialist Sweetheart is either completely and PURPOSELY flubbing this article from The Nation in order to support her “Medicare for All” dreams… or she’s really, really, really bad at math.

My guess is the latter. This chick is a bag of rocks.

$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.”

$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T.

That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.

And that’s before our premiums. https://t.co/soT6GSmDSG

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 2, 2018

See… that’s all very convincing and alarming and whatnot… until you realize SHE’S NOT EVEN CLOSE.

Wow. You claim $21 Trillion in Pentagon Waste? The entire Pentagon budget from 1789-2018 has totaled $18 trillion,

Come on, This is embarrassing. https://t.co/ezdhqWQFyc

— Brian Riedl (@Brian_Riedl) December 2, 2018

Well, um… maybe she thinks ALL Pentagon spending is waste. And threw in a couple of bonus trillions for fun.

The Nation made clear that the figure she’s quoting is not ACTUAL Pentagon spending. Maybe she didn’t read that part.

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. The disappearance of thousands of records adds further uncertainty. The upshot is that no one can know for sure how much of that $21 trillion was, or was not, being spent legitimately.

This is a wild misinterpretation of the Nation article. A key point of the article is these reported amounts do not reflect the Pentagon’s actual spending behavior. https://t.co/O3w6m1kBdV

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 2, 2018

Gotta pause and think about these sorts of numbers for even half a second. Pentagon waste over a 17 year period can’t exceed total Pentagon spending over that period.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 2, 2018

#DUH

Even fellow libs realized she DONE DERPED UP:

This is annoying because AOC is making a bad/self defeating argument for something I support. 1, “can’t be audited because DOD is bad at accounting” is not the same as “wasted.” Makes her look like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. https://t.co/DVzrUB8bSr

— David Solimini (@CommsDirector) December 2, 2018

Yes, yes it is.

And she wonders why Conservatives keep mocking her? Because she keeps giving us things to mock.