By Eliza Relman
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said a society that "allows
billionaires to exist" while some Americans live in abject poverty is
"immoral."
"I'm not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are
immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of
Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access
to public health is wrong," Ocasio-Cortez said during an event honoring the
legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday.
The 29-year-old lawmaker said the existence of billionaires is a
byproduct of skyrocketing economic inequality and suggested that Americans
shouldn't strive to become super-rich.
"Maybe this idea of idealizing this outcome of 'Maybe one
day you too can be a billionaire and earn more than millions of families
combined' is not an aspirational or good thing," she said during her MLK
Day conversation with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ocasio-Cortez, who stunned the political world when she beat
longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in New York's Democratic primary last June,
centered her candidacy around economic justice.
Her policy platform includes a host of bold proposals —
including a federal jobs guarantee and Medicare for All, which is a
single-payer healthcare system supported by progressive Democrats — that would
alleviate poverty and economic inequality. And, along with a growing faction of
Democratic candidates, she banned corporate PAC money from her campaign.
She's not the first prominent Democrat to scrutinize the role of
billionaires and the super-rich in American society and politics. Sens. Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have long railed against growing economic
inequality and the outsize influence of corporations and wealthy donors in US
politics.
—Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) January 22, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez — like Sanders and Warren — has long said poverty
and a lack of social mobility are the most foundational injustices in American
society.
"I think it's wrong that the majority of the country
doesn't make a living wage, I think it's wrong that you can work 100 hours and
not feed your kids," Ocasio-Cortez told Coates. "I think it's wrong
that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government,
experiencing a wealth transfer from the public, for paying people less than a
minimum wage."
One of the new congresswoman's policy advisers, Dan Riffle, uses
the Twitter handle "Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure" and said
Monday that he hopes Ocasio-Cortez can start a new conversation in the
Democratic Party around targeting the super-rich.
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