Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary called out leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for her job-killing policies that have crippled the tax-obsessed state of New York.
On the Mar. 3 edition of CNN This Morning, O’Leary spoke about how “uninvestable” states like New York, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey have become.
O’Leary noted that businesses have been forced to uproot and move out of New York due to the state’s punitive taxes and regulations.
“She’s great at killing jobs,” O’Leary said of AOC. “She kills jobs by the thousands.” He then pointed to the incident when AOC managed to nix Amazon’s plans to build a headquarters in Queens. “Where did Amazon take their jobs? They took them away from her. She threatened to sue them if they created jobs.”
Co-anchor Poppy Harlow seemed confused by O’Leary’s comments and asked him why New York was uninvestable. O’Leary clapped back:
“Try and do a project in New York. The regulatory environment is punitive.” Fellow co-anchor Don Lemon even admitted that O’Leary was “saying what a lot of people are saying, especially what happened with that Amazon thing here in New York.”
AOC didn’t take kindly to being called out as a job-killer and took to social media to blast O’Leary. AOC tweeted that if New York is “so ‘uninvestable’, then why is NYC home to some of the most billionaires in the world?”
What AOC failed to mention was the New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli admission to Bloomberg News in December that there’s “‘no doubt there’s been a net migration of taxpayers at the upper end. It should be a concern for everybody.”
O’Leary further explained his own struggles with trying to set up a business in New York: “I had a project in upstate New York behind the grid in Niagara Falls for electricity — a global data center we were building.
Eventually, it got so bad with the politicians in the local region and the state policy, we moved it to Norway and all the jobs.”
It’s clear to see why New York, and other leftist-run states, are uninvestable. Democrats’ policies of higher taxes, oppressive regulations, and job-killing initiatives have hamstrung the states’ ability to create and retain jobs.
It’s time for a change and for Democrats to stop using their states as a petri dish for their radical, job-killing policies.
Erica Carlin is an independent journalist, opinion writer and contributor to several news and opinion sources. She is based in Georgia.
