Mr. Wonderful Rips AOC Apart on CNN, Even Don Lemon Seems to Agree
They call “Shark Tank” panelist and investor Kevin O’Leary “Mr. Wonderful” for a reason: He can find the silver lining in any cloudy situation.
Sure, O’Leary is a well-known conservative, but he was gracious enough to call Democrat New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “great” during an appearance on CNN.
Granted, it might have been in the context of pointing out that she was “great at killing jobs” — but we’ve all got to excel at something, right?
O’Leary made the remarks Friday on “CNN This Morning” — that’s the morning show hosted by Don Lemon, so judging by the ratings, there’s a very good chance you may have missed it. For those that did tune in, however, they saw O’Leary being asked why it was so hard to keep employees in the current market.
Part of the reason, he said, was that younger workers didn’t want to come back to the office, which made negotiations difficult.
“We’re supposedly going into a recession at full employment. It makes no sense. But the reality is pumping $3 trillion into the economy has provided a lot of liquidity,” O’Leary said.
“So we’re hiring every day and we’re competing every day, and we cannot get them in the office. Forty-four percent of our employees now across our venture portfolio work remotely and they ain’t coming into the office, period.”
This includes digital nomads who live in countries like Cambodia, France and India — but in America, there’s also another unseen factor, which is “the competition of states.”
“I don’t put companies here in New York anymore, or in Massachusetts, or in New Jersey, or in California. Those states are uninvestable. The policy here is insane, the taxes are too high. We put them in Fargo, North Dakota because 40 percent of the people work elsewhere, including Boston,” he said.
Do you agree with Kevin O’Leary?
When co-host Poppy Harlow asked why New York was uninvestable, O’Leary shot back: “Try and do a project in New York.”
“Absolutely,” Don Lemon — Don freaking Lemon! — replied.
And, according to O’Leary, it’s not just the taxes: “The regulatory environment is punitive. 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. Norway has it now. Thousands of jobs coming out of that,” he continued.
Co-hosts Harlow and Kaitlan Collins pointed out that we “hear some pushback from our elected officials in New York on that,” particularly from Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“I’ll debate them any time of the day you want, particularly AOC,” O’Leary said.
“I’d watch that,” Collins responded.
O’Leary proceeded to eviscerate Ocasio-Cortez: “She’s great at killing jobs,” he continued. “She kills jobs by the thousands. You know, another New Jersey problem — where did Amazon take their jobs? They took them away from her. She threatened to sue them if they created jobs. I mean, this is a reality. It’s a reality that the –“
“There’s a little more to it but let’s not relitigate that,” Harlow interjected. (“Let’s not relitigate that,” for the uninitiated, is what a TV anchor says when they’ve clearly lost the debate but also realize they control the airtime, so they can move on.)
“Well, you know, sorry. I’m just telling the truth,” O’Leary said.
And then — again! — Don Lemon seemed to take his side: “He’s saying what a lot of people are saying, especially what happened with that Amazon thing here in New York.”
For those with short memories Ocasio-Cortez was instrumental in killing a massive Amazon warehouse project in New York City over mostly chimerical concerns.
(The root cause, as always, is that a big corporation is automatically bad no matter what it does. While Amazon’s suppression of speech and de facto subsidization of The Washington Post via Jeff Bezos’ fortune have earned it my ire, my assumption is that AOC shares none of these concerns.)
So, yes, she is “great” at killing jobs like that. She may not like it, but it’s a wonderful description of her core competency — and from Mr. Wonderful himself, no less. Who said the moniker wasn’t apt?
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