by Frank Holmes, reporter
For more than 250,000 Americans, COVID-19 has been a deadly virus.
For Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the global pandemic is a chance over Thanksgiving to make the government pay the salary of every man, woman, and teenager in the country.
AOC is one of the most prominent politicians calling for another national lockdown to fight the spread of the coronavirus. But she wants Congress to pass one of her pet programs, as well.
“We need to send every American a check until this crisis is over,” she said recently on Twitter.
AOC, who ousted a 10-term Democratic incumbent with the help of the Democratic Socialists of America, told a town hall meeting in Queens that the government needs more policies to lock its inhabitants up in their homes—and lots more “stimulus” checks in order to keep Americans idle at home.
“I’ve championed monthly stimulus checks to folks in the country and everyone that needs it since the pandemic started,” she told a meeting in her home district.
She’s so in favor of the government sending money to people who do nothing that she’d vote for it, even if President Donald Trump got credit for it.
“I was really, really hoping that we were going to be able to cut a deal before the election,” she said.
To get the virus under control, we need to pay people to stay home.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 19, 2020
The demand that the government pay people to stay at home and do nothing echoes AOC’s signature proposal the Green New Deal, which would have the government promise “economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.”
And like the Green New Deal, the temporary checks are the tip of a very expensive iceberg to have the taxpayer foot the bill for almost every activity in the economy.
“Can we please get people stimulus checks and mortgage relief and rent forgiveness and small business support and free testing and hazard pay and healthcare for the uninsured (& underinsured) in the middle of a pandemic or is that too socialist too?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
Having the government provide people with “free,” low-grade services is a key plank in the socialist platform.
AOC and her colleague, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, are leading the charge—but they’re not alone. One of Joe Biden’s top advisors wants a nationwide lockdown, followed by huge “stimulus” checks or “free” services.
America needs a nationwide, 4-6 week shutdown, one of the members of Joe Biden’s coronavirus advisory group, Dr. Michael Osterholm, told Yahoo Finance.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” Biden’s advisor told the web-based news service. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
One of Biden's new coronavirus task force doctors floating the idea of a 4-6 week lockdown:
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers … if we did that, then we could lockdown for 4 to 6 weeks."pic.twitter.com/zNmuQvPpIJ
— Zack Guzmán (@zGuz) November 11, 2020
He has Biden’s ear, and he has a friend on the inside of the Federal Reserve System ready to prime the pump for the debt and inflation this plan would unleash.
Osterholm wrote an op-ed in The New York Times with the president of the Federal Reserve in Minnesota, Neel Kashkari,saying the real problem with the last set of lockdowns was that they weren’t strict enough and weren’t run by Washington bureaucrats.
“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country,” they wrote.
“To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible,” they continued.
Osterholm walked his remarks back as soon as his remarks caught public attention. “It was not a recommendation. I have never made this recommendation to Biden’s group. We’ve never talked about it,” he told NBC News.
The left-wing website Vox tried to popularize a lockdown fo “a few months” in an article titled “America Needs to Close Down.”
Vox believes the same Americans who get “temporarily” locked out of their jobs, and cooped up in their homes or apartments, should be taxed to pay for even heavier welfare, bailouts, and social programs. “Businesses that are forced to close, such as bars and restaurants, and their employees could be made whole with a bailout or another form of financial aid,” Vox said. “If people lose health insurance as they lose jobs, Congress could boost support for safety net programs like Medicaid or COBRA.”
Joe Biden has campaigned on a national mask mandate—but left-wing Democrats around the country are pushing for more extreme measures.
Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom, New York’s Andrew Cuomo, and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer are threatening to fine law-abiding citizens who have too many people over for Thanksgiving dinner.
Is it possible they’re setting up such extreme policies as the “bad cop” so that Americans will be thrilled when Biden opens up the federal coffers for a new wave of socialist programs?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”