Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently announced she would raise her congressional staff’s wages. The average entry-level congressional staffer earns $31,500 a year; Ocasio-Cortez set the starting salary of her staff at $52,000.

The adjustment is logical, since her staff live in Washington, DC, and New York, two of the most expensive cities in the country. Ocasio-Cortez is simply compensating the people who make her office run with a living wage. But Fox News host Pete Hegseth responded to the move by decrying it as “socialism and communism.”

Now, imagine how that sounded to viewers struggling to keep up with rising living costs, as hundreds of millions do. If socialism is a system where people are rewarded for their work with economic security, then what does that make capitalism? Whatever the answer, it doesn’t sound so great.