AOC Is Unfit the Lead the Nation

        Betting markets show Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the frontrunner to snag the 2028 Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

        But AOC refuses to pay back her student loans, despite earning $173,000 a year as a member of Congress. That’s a red flag that she’s fiscally irresponsible and holds taxpayers in utter disdain.

        Her supporters claim her college loans make her relatable. One fan posts on X, “I need a president that’s still drowning in student loan debt with me.” Democratic activist David Hogg posts, “this is what happens when we elect normal people to Congress who have student debt and don’t engage in insider trading.”

        Sorry: relatable to the elite but not to everybody. Households in the top fifth for earnings are three times as likely to have college debt as households in the bottom fifth of the economy. That means when doctors, lawyers and members of Congress don’t pay their college loans, working stiffs who never got to go to college — bus drivers, waiters and sanitation workers — end up paying. Totally unfair.

        Voters could soon elect a freeloader in chief to the nation’s highest office. If that happens, hold onto your wallet. And prepare for financial calamity.

        Political analyst Doug Schoen warned that AOC “carries massive ideological baggage.” Sorry, that dignifies what’s between her ears. She’s hardly a Marxist scholar.

        Truth is, she’s a poster child for the economic illiteracy of Gen Z and millennial socialists.

        AOC currently owes between $15,000 and $19,000 in student loans. She owed $19,000 in 2019, and her latest financial filing shows that seven years later, at least $15,000 of that remains unpaid.

        She’s single and has no dependents.

        She’s also had a boyfriend/fiance for the last decade but refused to provide any financial information about him, though she listed him as “spouse” when it served her. They broke up last week.

        She spends $22 a pop for signature Stila Stay bright red liquid lipstick — about twice what lipstick costs at the drug store — and is praised in British Vogue for her cutting-edge fashion and “power tailoring.”

        And she’s announced that she’s planning to freeze her eggs — an expensive proposition.

        But she can’t manage her personal finances well enough to pay back her student loans. It’s crazy to trust her with the nation’s finances.

        She said in 2019, during her first year in the House, “It was literally easier for me to become the youngest woman in American history elected to Congress than it is for me to pay off my student loan debt.” When she was a bartender, that was plausible. Not anymore.

        Her ongoing indebtedness is disqualifying.

        Across the nation, millions of Americans have delayed marriage, childbearing and homeownership because of student loan debt. It’s a serious problem. That doesn’t mean the debts should simply be erased.

        In 2021, AOC, along with Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, pressed then-President Joe Biden to offer $50,000 loan “forgiveness” to each debtholder and blasted him for not getting it done by executive order. But the word “forgiveness” is a hoax.

        When you worship, you ask the Almighty for “forgiveness.” Or you may ask a friend you’ve offended for “forgiveness.” But when a student loan borrower doesn’t pay, the debt isn’t forgiven. It’s transferred. Taxpayers get gouged. Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to the 43 million Americans with student loans last March, reminding them that taxpayers are on the hook when loans aren’t paid.

        AOC has no respect for taxpayers. That’s also why she’s outspoken against work requirements for able-bodied people on Medicaid. She wants taxpayers to fork over their earnings to pay for Medicaid coverage for couch potatoes who are able to work but refuse.

        Medicaid has become a license to drop out of the workforce.

        Back in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adults, not just children, disabled people and pregnant women. She argued the expansion would free Americans from what she disparagingly labeled “job lock” — in short, staying in a job for the health insurance. Expanding Medicaid would let aspiring poets or artists quit the drudgery of work and find themselves. On your dime.

        Fast-forward to the present: The poets and couch potatoes are having a heyday. The latest data show that almost six out of every 10 nondisabled adults on Medicaid don’t work. That’s why the Trump administration and Congress enacted a new requirement in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that healthy adults without dependents at home either work, participate in work readiness such as volunteering, or attend addiction treatment or job counseling 20 hours a week to qualify for Medicaid.

        But AOC vehemently opposes this reform. On her website, she calls it a “paperwork requirement,” oblivious that getting people back into the workforce is essential to their wellbeing and to the nation. The shrinking work participation puts the nation on a course of financial failure, as too few working-age people are contributing to the nation’s productivity and paying into Social Security and Medicare to sustain those programs. But AOC couldn’t care less.

        AOC’s a moocher, and she sides with the moochers.

        If you want to keep what you earn, and if you want the nation to remain economically viable, elect a president who will be a responsible steward of taxpayers’ money. Don’t send an economically illiterate freeloader to the White House.

        Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and Chairman & Founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths at www.hospitalinfection.org. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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