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Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would love to raise taxes on Americans but it appears she isn’t too keen on paying them herself.
The New York freshman lawmaker has yet to pay a seven-year-old tax bill that stems from a failed business effort, according to the New York Post.
In 2012, AOC, as she is known, founded the company Brook Avenue Press, a publishing firm that searched out writers, artists, and designers from urban regions who could help portray the Bronx in a positive manner in children’s books.
A March 2019 report noted that public records indicate the state of New York dissolved the company in October 2016, which the state is empowered to do when corporate taxes owed by the business go unpaid or a return is not filed.
The New York Tax Department proceeded to file a warrant against the now-failed business on July 6, 2017, over an unpaid tax bill of $1,618.36.
“The company probably got numerous letters from the state and probably ignored them,” said one New York City accountant then.
As of Friday, the Post noted, the tax bill had yet to be paid, but due to interest had grown to $2,088.78, according to the state tax agency.
“She just thinks she’s better than everyone else. Clearly, she’s worse,” Hank Sheinkopf, spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez’s main June primary-race opponent, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, told the Post.
But according to AOC’s office, that bill was issued “in error.”
“The congresswoman is still in the process of contesting the tax warrant. The business has been closed for several years now, and so we believe that the state Tax Department has continued to collect the franchise tax in error,” Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the lawmaker, told the paper.
“As anyone who’s tried to contest a tax bill in error knows, it takes time,” she added.
In its previous report, the Post quoted an aide for AOC who told the paper two weeks earlier that the tax bill would be paid. But by press time, that had changed. Aide Corbin Trent told the Post that lawyers for the freshman socialist were looking into the issue.
“This is the first we’re hearing of it, and we won’t have any additional comment until we look into it,” Trent said.
“I’m her congressional staffer, not her personal accountant,” Trent told the Post at the time.
Ironically, Ocasio-Cortez is a major proponent of raising taxes on practically everyone else, as evidenced by her “Green New Deal,” a massive tax-and-spend scheme ostensibly based on reducing ‘emissions’ to fight ‘climate change’ and “fix societal problems like economic inequality and racial injustice.”
To accomplish that, the plan calls on the federal government to wean the entire country off of fossil fuels by a certain date, and by ‘calling on’ the government, that means Congress and bureaucrats forcing Americans to live a certain way.
All of which comes at a massive cost.
A study released in July 2019 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute found that in the first year alone, if the Green New Deal is implemented in its entirety, Americans “will be on the hook for more than $70,000 in increased costs for electricity, upgrading vehicles and housing, and shipping in just the first year under the Green New Deal.”
The costs would not be the same in every state, to be fair; the CEI found that Americans living in Alaska, for instance, would pay up to $100,000 due to the remoteness of the state.
“The Green New Deal is a radical blueprint to de-carbonize the American economy by refashioning how we grow food, move people and goods, source and distribute electricity, and build the structures where we live, work, and play,” said CEI President Kent Lassman.
Speaking of high taxes, even AOC’s mother is averse to them. Blanca Ocasio-Cortez recently moved to the low-tax, high warmth climate of Florida because New York Democrats never seem to confiscate enough wealth from the state’s residents.
‘I was paying $10,000 a year in real estate taxes up north. I’m paying $600 a year in Florida. It’s stress-free down here,” she said in March 2019.
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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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