Even Politifact and FactCheck couldn’t parse Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s astonishing statement about the cause of unemployment in a way that made her look anything but ignorant on the subject. From the first site:

During the interview, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”…

…[But] by the official statistics, multiple job holders account for a tiny fraction of American workers.

And this percentage isn’t high by historical standards…

…[P]eople who might be working 70 or 80 hours a week amount to a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage—310,000 people at most in a pool of employed Americans totaling more than 150 million…

… a person is counted as employed as long as they have at least one job. They don’t get counted twice if they have two jobs. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong in saying multiple job holding and long hours affect the unemployment rate.

The second site, FactCheck, agrees. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong and wrong, as well as wrong.

But why do I say it’s worse than you think? Two reasons. The first is that you don’t need Politifact or FactCheck to know that Ocasio-Cortez is wrong. I’ve often written here that economics is not a strong suit of mine and that in fact I consider myself weak in that area. I took it in high school rather than college, and it didn’t stick very well.

Nevertheless, when I heard that Ocasio-Cortez had said that, common sense told me that of course she was wrong. I didn’t need (nor should any other even marginally intelligent person need) unemployment statistics to know that a lot of people working two jobs would not lower unemployment rates. It makes zero sense on the face of it. So Ocasio-Cortez isn’t just economics-ignorant, she’s lacking in very very basic common sense.

But it’s even worse than that. Much worse. After all, I said there were two reasons.

The second is this: Ocasio-Cortez is a graduate of Boston University with a degree in (drum roll, please!) economics and international relations. Yes, economics.

You can look it up:

She graduated fourth in her class from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations.

Fourth in her class. In economics.

What is going on in BU’s economics department? What on earth are they teaching there? I know that leftist politics has taken over most of the universities in the country, but economics has some basic principles that still must be learned. Right? Right??

[ADDENDUM: And she’s not so great in her other field, international relations, either—although since that’s a much “softer” subject, it’s understandable that her courses were probably steeped in leftist twaddle. For example:

[Joe] Lieberman also took a shot at Ocasio-Cortez views on international politics. “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t speak much about foreign policy during the primary, but when she did, it was from the DSA policy book—meaning support for socialist governments, even if they are dictatorial and corrupt (Venezuela), opposition to American leadership in the world, even to alleviate humanitarian disasters (Syria), and reflexive criticism of one of America’s great democratic allies (Israel),” he wrote.

Ocasio-Cortez recently flip-flopped in the span of a few days on the issue of Israel and Palestine. On Friday, she asserted the Jewish state’s right to exist but raised eyebrows after incoherent statements about Israel’s “occupation of Palestine.” She insisted she’s “not the expert at geopolitics on this issue.”

But during a town hall style sit-down with Democracy Now on Monday, she balked at repeating her support for the two-state solution and thus Israel’s right to exist. “This is a conversation I’m sitting down with lots of activists in this movement on and I’m looking forward to engaging in this conversation, she said.

Fourth in her class, folks. Fourth in her class.]

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]