Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary ripped leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for her role in hamstringing the tax-obsessed state of New York from being able to effectively produce jobs.
O’Leary called leftist-run states like New York, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey “uninvestable,” on the Mar. 3 edition of CNN This Morning. Turning to New York, O’Leary quipped that “the policy here is insane — the taxes are too high.” He noted having to move businesses out of New York because of the state's wild, punitive taxing and regulatory apparatuses.
He later put AOC on blast: “She’s great at killing jobs. She kills jobs by the thousands.” O’Leary pointed out the incident when AOC managed to nuke plans by Amazon 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 appeared confused, “Wait, why is New York uninvestable?” O’Leary clapped back: “Try and do a project in New York,” he said. “The regulatory environment is punitive.”
Co-anchor Kaitlan Collins attempted to object to O’Leary’s rebuke of the New York regulatory hellscape. She waved around “some pushback from our elected officials in New York on that” such as leftist Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY). O’Leary threw down a debate gauntlet: “I’ll debate them any time of the day you want.”
Harlow also attempted to downplay O’Leary’s AOC criticism on the Amazon debacle by saying, “there’s a little more to it but let’s not re-litigate that.” But Harlow found herself surprisingly undercut by liberal co-anchor Don Lemon, who admitted: “[O’Leary is] saying what a lot of people are saying, especially what happened with that Amazon thing here in New York.”
AOC apparently didn’t appreciate being called out as a job-killer, so she took to social media to draft an incoherent, oxymoronic tweet railing against O’Leary. “If it’s so ‘uninvestable,’ then why is NYC home to some of the most billionaires in the world?” AOC must have missed the memo from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to Bloomberg News in December. He said that there’s “‘no doubt there’s been a net migration of taxpayers at the upper end. It should be a concern for everybody.’”
Bloomberg News reported that an “analysis by New York City’s Independent Budget Office” showed “that the number of city taxpayers who earned between $1 million and $5 million declined 11% in 2020 from the prior year.” Even DiNapoli admitted that the state “‘ might be getting near that tipping point where we do make it economically unsustainable for enough of those folks to stay here.’”
O’Leary emphasized his own dismal experience trying to set up business in The Great Apple: “I had a project in upstate New York behind the grid in Niagara Falls for electricity — a global data center we were building.” He continued: “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.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact CNN at 404-827-1500 and demand the outlet stop shilling for the tax-obsessed, leftist utopia in New York.
