Ocasio-Cortez explains how to easily pay for socialist health care - and falls flat on her face

Socialist Democrat Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) is being ridiculed over a tweet where she attempts to show how easily it would be to pay for Medicare for All.

In the tweet posted from her official social media account, Ocasio-Cortez claims that the government could have easily paid for the health care scheme if Pentagon accounting errors were corrected and the money applied to her agenda.

"$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions 'could not be traced, documented, or explained.' $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T," she tweeted.

"That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon," she added.

'It's badly flawed.'

Ocasio-Cortez was immediately corrected by various critics on social media, but her greatest rebuke came from the Washington Post fact-checker, which gave her their greatest error rating of "four Pinocchios" for her claim.

They noted that the $21 trillion of Pentagon accounting errors were over 17 years, while her estimate of spending for the health care program was over 10 years — a mistake of simple math.

But even more importantly, Ocasio-Cortez ignored that the accounting errors were a sum of both assets and liabilities, and not simply an amount that would be saved and could be applied to another program.

When the office of Ocasio-Cortez responded to the Washington Post and called its critique semantic in nature, the paper rejected the excuse.

"Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report," the Post wrote. "But it's unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread."

"She cited the $21 trillion figure and said '66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon,'" they noted.

"That's a direct comparison," they continued. "It's badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion."

Here's Ocasio-Cortez getting torched on Fox News for the mistake:

"It is incredibly problematic because she doesn't have a working knowledge of basic economics," said Fox News contributor Kennedy. "Socialism is an economic system.You have to have an economic argument in order to A, sell it, and B, make it work."

"She cannot do either because she doesn't understand how the world works," she explained, "how people make money, how money is created, and the creation of money is actually a positive sum effort where more people thrive when more people make money!"

Ocasio-Cortez was lauded by the media and the far left after she defeated a Democrat Party boss in the primary election for New York's 14th Congressional District and stunned the political world.