PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Yesterday, I mentioned the stupidity of new Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she congratulated herself and other far right wackos for prompting Amazon to backtrack on its plans to build a “second headquarters” near New York.

The plan would have resulted in 25,000 new jobs – perhaps up to 40,000 — and an estimated infusion of more than $25 billion to the New York area economy, not to mention the construction and other jobs associated with Amazon’s decision to build another headquarters.

I said yesterday that Ocasio-Cortez deserves what she gets, with is no new jobs in an area in or near her congressional district.

Well, Washington Post columnist Mark Thiessen, went even farther in a piece with this headline:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an economic illiterate — and that’s a danger to America

Thiessen continued:

“The left complains that conservatives are ‘obsessing’ over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Well, there is a reason for that: Ocasio-Cortez is driving the agenda of today’s Democrat Party — and her economic illiteracy is dangerous.

“Case in point: Last week, Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the tanking of a deal negotiated by her fellow Democrats in which Amazon promised to build a new headquarters in Long Island City, New York, right next to her congressional district. Amazon’s departure cost the city between 25,000 and 40,000 new jobs new jobs. Forget the tech workers whom Amazon would have employed. Gone are all the unionized construction jobs to build the headquarters, as well as thousands of jobs created by all the small businesses — restaurants, bodegas, dry cleaners and food carts — that were preparing to open or expand to serve Amazon employees. They are devastated by Amazon’s withdrawal.”

Thiessen makes a key point about Ocasio-Cortez total inexperience, if not stupidity. She thought that, because Amazon would not be getting incentives worth in the range of $3 billion, the money could instead go to liberal programs she favors.

Of course, that is not true and her perception illustrates how stupid she is.

“We were subsidizing those jobs,” she is reported to have said. “Frankly, if we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district, ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire more teachers. We could fix our subways. We could put a lot of people to work for that amount of money if we wanted to.”

No, you can’t, Thiessen counters. Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to realize that New York does not have $3 billion in cash sitting around waiting to be spent on her socialist dreams. The subsidies to Amazon were tax incentives, not cash payouts. It is Amazon’s money, which New York agreed to make tax-exempt, so the company would invest it in building its new headquarters, hiring new workers and generating tens of billions in new tax revenue.

Beyond that key point and rather than selecting Thiessen quotes to emphasize, let me just reprint much of his piece.

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As New York Mayor Bill de Blasio explained the Amazon deal would have produced “$27 billion in new tax revenue to fuel priorities from transit to affordable housing — a nine-fold return on the taxes the city and state were prepared to forgo to win the headquarters.” Unlike Ocasio-Cortez’s imaginary $3 billion slush fund, that is real money that actually could have been used to hire teachers, fix subways and put people to work. With Amazon leaving New York, that $27 billion leaves with it. Genius.

Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to understand that by helping to drive Amazon away, she did not save New York $3 billion; she cost New York $27 billion. There is a difference between having bad ideas and not grasping basic facts. Reasonable people can disagree about whether New York should have offered Amazon $3 billion in tax incentives — or anything at all — to build its headquarters in the city. But that is different from not understanding that New York is not writing a $3 billion check to Amazon.

Sadly, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t learn from her mistakes. She made the same kind of error in December when she tweeted, “$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained.’ $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.” But, as Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood told The Post, “DoD hasn’t received $21 trillion in (nominal) appropriated funding across the entirety of American history.” Once again, Ocasio-Cortez did not grasp that the Pentagon did not have a magic pile of $21 trillion in cash sitting in a vault somewhere.

Her economic illiteracy matters because she is the principal author of the Green New Deal, which has been endorsed by most of the leading Democrat candidates for president. From this unschooled mind has sprung the most ambitious plan for government intervention in the economy since Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s train pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station.

If Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand how tax subsidies work, how can she be trusted to plan the federal takeover of the health-care, energy and transportation sectors of our economy? Think she and her allies have any idea how to, as her now infamous talking points put it, upgrade or replace “every building in America” . . . or replace “every combustible-engine vehicle” . . . or connect every corner of America with high-speed rail . . . or replace all fossil-fuel energy with alternative energy sources — all in 10 years’ time? Apparently, they think we just have to find all the magic pots of cash the government is hiding.

When this kind of ignorance is driving policymaking in Washington, America is in profound danger. Amazon left New York because Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow democratic socialists created a hostile environment in the city. And if Ocasio-Cortez has her way, Democrats are going to do to the rest of America what they just did to New York.

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I’ll give Wall Street Journal columnist the last word on the Amazon deal – or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the “undeal:”

“The story’s over but it doesn’t stop hurting. Twenty-five thousand jobs lost, maybe 40,000 when all is said and done, and of all kinds—high-tech, management, white-collar, blue. All the construction, and the signs and symbols of a coming affluence: the streets lit bright, the sidewalks busy, shops and restaurants humming, hiring. The feeling of safety you have when you pass doorways on the street at night and can hear laughter and conversation on the other side.

“This is not just ‘a loss,’ it is a whole lost world. And it is a watershed event for my town. After Amazon’s withdrawal no major American company will open a new headquarters here for at least a generation. No CEO is going to do what Jeff Bezos did, invest all that time and money, do all the planning, negotiating and deciding, only to see it collapse in bitter headlines because the politicians you’re making the deal with can’t control their own troops, and because, in the end, it is summoning a humiliation to do big business in a town whose political life is dominated by a wild and rising left.”