Thread by @JewhadiTM

.@AOC blew @Amazon out of New York in 2019 over tax breaks but demanded one for herself in 2012 washex.am/2GkD0af

AOC, who regularly lambastes Republicans over tax cuts and helped scuttle a plan by Amazon to locate in NYC because she opposed tax breaks the company might receive, costing the city an estimated 25K jobs, sought a tax break for herself in 2012 so she could launch her own company

Ocasio-Cortez, who graduated from Boston University in 2011, today calls herself a "democratic socialist." But in 2012, she was a businesswoman seeking tax benefits for her startup, Brook Avenue Press, which published books and curricula for children in the Bronx.

"Plenty of entrepreneurs have started their businesses on a shoestring and any break they receive means more flexibility for further growth,” Ocasio-Cortez said in 2012 in a news release.

"A tax break could mean part-time work for someone else or keeping a business' doors open long enough to turn a profit.”

“Young entrepreneurs are playing a special role in developing promising, creative enterprises for our future, and a small break can open up their resources for hiring, creating a new product, or reinvesting in the local economy," Ocasio-Cortez added.

Ocasio-Cortez was one of several Bronx-based entrepreneurs and start-up advocates quoted in the release, put out by Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., in support for the proposed Small Business Start-up Support Act.

The bill would have increased deductions for start-up costs from $5,000 to $10,000.

Tax experts were surprised to hear Ocasio-Cortez supported tax breaks to fuel economic growth while considering herself a democratic socialist.

Steve Horwitz, a distinguished professor of free enterprise at Ball State University and senior affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center, said AOC’s instincts were right at the time to support tax breaks but wrong to only want them for a special class of small businesses.

“Why should anyone be exempt from taxation if part of our obligation to others is to pay taxes and provide for the sort of services that democratic socialists think that various levels of government should provide?” said Horwitz about the small business tax break.

“This is the kind of thing Amazon was asking for in Long Island.”

Horwitz added that government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers, whether it is giving Amazon special breaks or exempting small businesses from taxes larger business do not have to pay.

Chris Edwards, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, was surprised that Ocasio-Cortez, an avowed democratic socialist, would support it.

“It’s a very Republican proposal because it moves the way the GOP has long advocated, which is allowing more 'expensing' or immediate write-offs of business investment,” Edwards told the Washington Examiner.

He pointed out the same tax deduction proposal was in the Republicans' second tax reform bill.

Ocasio-Cortez has in the past referred to Republican tax proposals as a “tax scam.”