During her visit to Democrat CPAC over the weekend, aka South by Southwest, celebrity democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez misquoted Bill Gates in an effort to defend workplace automation.
Yes, she was all over the place.
First up, here’s here quote on robots replacing workers and why we shouldn’t fear it as long as we have socialist policies that will pay people who don’t work:
“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. 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, our problem.” — @AOC https://t.co/OWHPj7BMXx
— Fabio Chiusi (@fabiochiusi) March 10, 2019
Yeah robots! And here she is misquoting Gates, claiming that he wants to tax robots at 90%, which she then goes on to say means he wants to tax corporations at 90%:
AOC at SXSW (03/09):
-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
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 10, 2019
Except that’s not what Gates said. Here’s the interview he gave with the website Quartz where he explained that we should think about taxing robots that take the jobs of people, but no where does he say 90%. And no where does he say tax corporations at 90%:
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Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.
And what the world wants is to take this opportunity to make all the goods and services we have today, and free up labor, let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique. And we still deal with an immense shortage of people to help out there.
So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you’re net ahead. But you can’t just give up that income tax, because that’s part of how you’ve been funding that level of human workers.
Later on, she went on to call capitalism “irredeemable”:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called capitalism an “irredeemable” system that is to blame for income inequality https://t.co/lXo50aBJW0
— Bloomberg (@business) March 10, 2019
She, of course, liked about the popularity of socialism to sell this view of hers:
Q for @AOC from @briebriejoy: "For the first time, more people have a positive view of socialism than capitalism."
FWIW, for first time, Dems/voters under 30 feel this way. But not most voters. Yet to hear the GOP talk rn… https://t.co/ZgWpFBOnAy
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) March 9, 2019
And she claimed that corporations have taken over the government:
“We should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government.” @AOC explained why she is in favor of democratic socialism at #SXSW #tictocnews pic.twitter.com/iBogpdLOt6
— TicToc by Bloomberg (@tictoc) March 10, 2019
But we expect zero fact-checks on this conspiracy theory from the MSM firefighters:
Something tells me the blue checks will be less concerned by this conspiracy fearmongering of secret government controllers than they are with Trump’s https://t.co/cdp7yJhjWs
— Orange Muppet Energy (@sunnyright) March 10, 2019
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