Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) outraged her right-wing critics earlier this year when she helped block Amazon from getting billions of dollars in public subsidies from New York City to move there. Now the company is moving there anyway, and taxpayers get to keep their money.

Conservatives accused Ocasio-Cortez of killing 25,000 jobs by making sure the public did not have to shell out billions of dollars to the trillion-dollar company, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. They warned that no company should be denied public funding because such an action would prevent companies from moving in. They accused her of interfering with free-market capitalism, which when you think about it, isn’t really free if the public has to pay a company to move in.

But it turns out that all their gloom and doom warnings and accusations were wrong, because Amazon announced that it is coming to NYC anyway without the subsidies.

Why?

Because they can afford to do so without fleecing the public as most companies can do.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The giant online retailer said it has signed a new lease for 335,000 square feet on the city’s west side in the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, where it will have more than 1,500 employees. Amazon is taking the space without any of the special tax credits and other inducements the company had been offered to build a new headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, the company said. The new lease represents Amazon’s largest expansion in New York since it stunned the city by abandoning those earlier plans. Amazon pulled back after facing a backlash from some politicians and activists over the roughly $3 billion in financial incentives the city and state had extended to woo the company and the 25,000 new jobs it had pledged to create.

The company is now renting office space and is creating 1,500 jobs to start, well on pace for the 25,000 jobs promised over ten years.

As for the lawmaker who made this happen, Ocasio-Cortez took a moment to mock her critics on Twitter just a week after gutting Republican talking points about free college education on the same platform.

No wealthy company like Amazon should have to be paid billions from public coffers to do business in an area. Taxpayers have better things to spend their money on than corporations that can afford anything they want. The fact is that Ocasio-Cortez was right, just like Democrats are right about tax cuts not resulting in job creation. Conservatives owe her an apology, but we all know they won’t do it because they refuse to admit they were wrong.

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