The populist sledgehammer kills Amazon jobs that Middle America would love to have

Tito Brown can’t imagine driving a perfectly good thing out of a town that hasn’t had a perfectly good thing come its way in a very long time.

At least, a perfectly good thing the size and scope of the Amazon headquarters that ideological politics drove out of Long Island City on Thursday, when Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., danced on the grave of the deal as Amazon walked away from the New York project.

Brown doesn’t really get that. He governs a city with a declining population, a 40 percent poverty rate, and would welcome the opportunity for a project such as Amazon to have considered locating here.

“Oh, any time I can get regional and/or economic growth in my community, I would absolutely want that here,” he said. “It’s budget time.”Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the leader of the left-wing insurgency within the Democratic Party, slammed the plan in a tweet the moment it was announced in mid-November last year.