Alexandria swoops in with her white cape again. This time, selling the tin-foil socialists on the end-of-the-world-in-12-years-New Green deal while she…wait for it, wait for it…takes a gas-guzzling SUV to LaGuardia Airport.
Whilst at LaGuardia, she (crazy) eyes the croissants:
Croissants at LaGuardia are going for SEVEN DOLLARS A PIECE 😱
Yet some people think getting a whole hour of personal, dedicated human labor for $15 is too expensive??
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 1, 2019
Is this some sort of April Fool’s joke? No, the woman is dead serious. As you can imagine, just a few folks responded to what AOC thought was a, no doubt, ingenious observation:
Omg, you must have a croissant!!??
Shut it. If you can't afford a croissant then go get a cinnamon roll for 99 cent.
— Brandon Tatum (@TheOfficerTatum) April 1, 2019
What is AOC doing at the airport? Oh yes.. The communist rulers get to fly & ride around in SUV’s. The dirty trains are for us common folk pic.twitter.com/seJM2sfcsY
— Melissa A. (@TheRightMelissa) April 1, 2019
Bless your heart.
The croissants at LaGuardia are going for $7 because people continue to purchase them.
If the consumer wasn't buying the product, then the business would lower costs.
People living in socialist countries don't get croissants; they have to eat their pets.
— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) April 1, 2019
AOC, realizing the deluge of of snarky remarks her tweet inspired quipped back:
GOP taking every tweet so earnestly, making my point for me. It’s not an argument against the price of a croissant – it’s about the value of human worth. But I guess that idea is foreign to them since their policies treat people as disposable anyway.”-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Their policies treat people as disposable? That’s rich coming from a member of the sisterhood of the traveling white suits who support late-term abortion but I will be like Kermit the Frog, sip my tea and leave this one here for right now.
Ocasio-Cortez, once again, clearly does not understand why people find her to be ridiculous. It’s comedy gold. She also clearly does not understand why a croissant at the airport costs seven dollars. Yes, it is important:
Beyond the vendors themselves, local governments can make the raw supplies for airport vendors artificially high with absurd standards. For instance, Atlanta requires food suppliers who deliver to airports to obtain a $2 million insurance policy. Thus, an airport vendor purchasing materials for a croissant with a free-market value of a dollar may be paying double that to offset the costs of their suppliers’ insurance.
All of these burdensome regulations means that a beer that costs less than a buck at the supermarket, and $8 at a concert venue can cost well into the double digits at an airport bar. And that’s not just vendors being stingy per se. As we’ve seen above, they have to offset the costs of regulatory burdens from the delivery of raw materials to the price of labor willing to work at an airport.”-Tiana Lowe, The Washington Examiner
It’s at an airport, like a sports stadium. The cost of an airline ticket is outrageous but we have to pay pilots and security an outrageous amount. Food at a sports event is high but they have to pay the players an outrageous amount. See a pattern?
— MaryE (@nanna59) April 2, 2019
Outrageous salary? When my husband first started his career in the commercial airline industry, he was making around $30 an hour after taxes. Outrageous, I know! Pffffft. Glorified “bus drivers”. The is how most (outrageously paid) mainline pilots build enough time to be competitive for bigger jets and bigger salaries. A food service worker at LGA will soon make 11 dollars short of that. This salary was to fly a multi-million dollar piece of equipment and ferry the lives of 78 people on an Embraer ERJ-175 safely to and from their destination of choice. Mainline pilots (Boeing, Airbus, etc.) of course, make more money to fly larger aircraft and are responsible for carrying more souls across large spans of water and longer distances. Let’s not forget the hours upon hours of studying aircraft systems of multiple types of jets that go into this job and the thousands of dollars aspiring pilots pay to be able to do this job. So, I beg to differ on the “outrageous” salary for pilots bit.
AOC talks about the $15 minimum wage but neglects to mention that New York’s LGA is about to enact a $19 minimum wage for its workers, a pay increase unanimously supported by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Riddle me this: how are these salaries getting paid? Could it be why croissants are as high as $7 bucks? Could this be because air transit is a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week operation? Staffing and coverage is always needed at an airport. Not to mention the cost of a commute for workers and that most workers from pilots to Flight Attendants to TSA Agents to custodians have to park off-site and employee shuttle in. Ask any airport employee. They don’t just roll up in the Escalade. Unless, of course, you’re AOC. “Jet planes for me but not for thee”, she says. Yay for Socialism, food lines and biking, like everywhere! Don’t worry, AOC. One of the grossly overpaid pilots who you want to put out of work in the next 12 years so 30 year-old-video-game boy can sit in front of his flight simulator and make the same “living wage” will take you to and from D.C. on the shuttle. She really just needs to take that croissant and just shove it. In her mouth. Permanently.
Photo Credit: FlickR/Creative Commons/Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
Dietrich says: To quote someone who is no doubt one of AOC’s heroes, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Meanwhile, one of MY heroes said: “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell and George the Third — …may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.”
GWB says: Croissants at LaGuardia are going for SEVEN DOLLARS A PIECE
On top of everything else, it was (at least partially) a lie. Several people tweeted pictures of Au Bon Pain croissants for <$4. The Free Beacon even called them up and confirmed it.
It’s at an airport, like a sports stadium.
Or a movie theater.
While the arguments about all sorts of higher costs are true, there is also a PRIME reason the costs are higher: monopoly. Do you know how much a bottle of water costs at the airport now that you can’t bring your own? They can be over $4. For a 20oz bottle of Dasani that sells for <$2 elsewhere. (Before the liquid ban, they were higher than outside the airport, but not grotesquely so.) There's not much in the way of food or drink that you can now bring with you (unless you're gonna drink your infant's milk) through security. The same is true of stadiums and movie theaters. It has something to do with costs, but an awful lot to do with being a MONOPOLY.
The croissants at LaGuardia are going for $7 because people continue to purchase them.
See above. They continue to purchase them because they don’t have much other choice.
When my husband first started his career in the commercial airline industry, he was making around $30 an hour after taxes.
When did he start? Because at one point, $30/hr was a pretty damn good wage. (And, yes, I know quite a bit about commuter airlines and working your way up.)
So, I beg to differ on the “outrageous” salary for pilots bit.
Maybe not “outrageous” but it’s still pretty damn good. Of course, it is that good, not just because of the study and such put into it, but because there are not enough of them, and this is how you entice people to put in the effort to learn something like how to fly a modern jet. Good old supply and demand.
AOC talks about the $15 minimum wage but neglects to mention that New York’s LGA is about to enact a $19 minimum wage for its workers
You neglect to mention that they are moving up to $19/hr from… $15/hr. Yeah, that $7 croissant already reflects her desired minimum wage.
Until she can point out to me (with that vaunted Economics degree from BU) all the economic contributors to that $7 croissant, I think she probably needs to simply shut up about enacting her socialist vision. Does she understand supply logistics? Does she understand labor costs (it ain’t all wages, sweetcheeks)? Does she understand rent? (Well, we know the answer to that one is a negative.)
I will guarantee she has NEVER gone over the books at that place where she was a barista. I’m betting a big reason her book publishing company failed is she didn’t understand the first thing about costs. (She evidently didn’t factor in corporate state taxes to her company budget!)
I’m guessing she could have gotten a better economic education watching that one scene from Back To School than her entire four years at good old BU.
Jim says: ”… it is that good, not just because of the study and such put into it, but because there are not enough of them, and this is how you entice people to put in the effort to learn something like how to fly a modern jet.”
I want the best people, highly trained and having natural talent, to fly the planes in which I travel and the best highly trained and talented people to be the surgeons who operate on my body when it breaks down, not some socialist hacks. There are not enough of these highly skilled and talented people because that’s the nature of the spread of abilities across the whole population, hence we pay according to the quality of service provided by such excellent practitioners. Remember: pay peanuts, hire monkeys. I’m damned if some socialist monkey will fly a plane in which I travel or operate on my body.
GWB says: Keep in mind this:
What do you call someone who got ‘C’s all throughout medical school?
“Doctor”
And, trust me when I tell you that good pilots can come from way back on the bell curve. And some of the brightest people couldn’t land an airplane if it were on autopilot on a precision approach.
Still, wanting the best doesn’t negate the concept of supply and demand. When supply catches up to demand, wages go down. Even with pilots.
sound awake says: “The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities.
The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize—that fools are blind to their own foolishness.
As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
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