In an interview with Firing Line on PBS, socialist Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that unemployment is low because "everyone has two jobs" and still are barely able to feed their families.
There's just one problem: that's not how unemployment works.
The 28-year-old Democratic candidate, who's running for New York's 14th Congressional District on a platform of helping the poor and has long touted her degree in economics, is catching flack for her head-scratching excuse for the country's plummeting unemployment rate.
"There's roughly 4 percent unemployment, 3.9 percent unemployment. Do you think that capitalism has failed to deliver for working class Americans or is no longer the best vehicle for working class Americans?" PBS host Margaret Hoover asked in the segment.
"Well I think the numbers that you just talked about is part of the problem, right? Because we look at these figures and we say 'Oh, unemployment is low, everything is fine,' right? Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” she responded.
Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics and international relations from Boston University, according to the New York Times. So one would think that she would know that having two jobs has absolutely nothing to do with unemployment.
She also had a few more rather interesting takes on capitalism and the economy.
“We [millennials] never experienced really a time of true economic prosperity in the United States,” she claimed. “We are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree and it’s hard to say which direction that that takes.”
She also took quite a bit of heat for saying, in the same interview, that Israel is occupying Palestine, but then admitted she didn’t really know what she was talking about.