Every American who owns a phone also owns a calculator, because it came free as an app on the phone. The Democratic Socialists of America spent this summer writing a platform that would hand the federal government trillions of dollars in new bills to pay, and there is not one number anywhere in it. Apparently nobody bothered to open the app, let alone bring in the financial experts who could tell them what we are actually dealing with here.
This platform carries real weight. The Democratic Socialists of America has roughly 120,000 members, which makes it the largest socialist organization in American history, and its candidates are winning primaries and will be on ballots this November.
So voters are owed an answer to one simple question. If a group will not say what its own promises cost, why would anyone hand it the checkbook? There are only two explanations. Either these candidates do not know what they are proposing to spend, which means they cannot be trusted with a budget, or they know and decided voters were better off not seeing it.
Look at what they are promising. The Dallas Express, in a summary published in July, listed the main items: federal health insurance with no premiums or co-pays, government-owned energy and transit systems, government-owned housing with rent control everywhere, free college and the cancellation of every student loan in the country, free childcare, and a 32-hour workweek at full pay.
Not one of those items comes with a price, a tax plan or a timeline.
Someone else ran the numbers for them. According to an analysis by economist Adam N. Michel of the Cato Institute, the full platform would cost between $71 trillion and $212 trillion over ten years. That is roughly 18 to 53 percent of the entire American economy, on top of everything Washington already spends.
Michel also tested the answer the DSA gives whenever anyone asks who pays, which is that the rich will. He calculated what happens if you take everything they have. Wiping out every dollar of corporate profit in America and seizing the entire net worth of the Forbes 400 would still leave the plan short by $29 trillion to $169 trillion.
Health care alone makes the point. The Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund put the 10-year federal cost of a single government health plan at $27.5 trillion to $35 trillion, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated in 2020 that it would run $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion a year. The entire federal deficit this year is projected to be about $2 trillion.
Then there is the condition of the government that would have to pay for all of this. Peter Coy reported in The New York Times DealBook in May that federal debt held by the public, meaning money the government borrowed and has to pay back with interest, has passed 100 percent of everything the country produces in a year.
The last time that happened, soldiers were coming home from the Second World War, and the debt came down quickly afterward. This time the Congressional Budget Office projects it climbing to 175 percent by 2056.
Coy also reported that the 30-year Treasury bond now yields 5.12 percent, the highest since 2007, and that the government spends more on interest than it spends on the entire military. Every dollar of this platform would have to be borrowed on top of that, and nobody selling it has said so.
Other countries have already tried this, and the results are public. Argentina paid for popular promises with borrowed and printed money for years. Its national statistics agency, INDEC, reported inflation of 211 percent in 2023, the highest in three decades, with roughly four in ten Argentines living in poverty.
Greece shows how fast the bill can come due in a modern economy. The European Court of Auditors’ record of that crisis shows the government closing the banks and limiting how much of their own money people could take out on June 28, 2015. The Guardian reported that same week that Greek pharmacies were short of medicine and grocers were short of food.
In those countries the promises were popular, the costs were never published, and working families paid the difference.
There is a bigger problem underneath the numbers, and it is about character. This same platform calls for abolishing the United States Senate, ending the Electoral College, and replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary that answer to Congress. Co-chair Megan Romer went on Fox News and confirmed the Senate position was real, answering “true” when she was asked directly.
Think about that combination. A group wants to take apart two branches of the federal government, and it will not publish the cost of its own spending plan. Nothing inside that organization requires a promise to add up before a candidate carries it door to door.
Making a promise to people who will be handed the bill, and never showing them the bill, is not a shortcut. It is dishonest. No political organization should operate in this manner.
The Centercratic Party was built on nine principles that hold whether an election is close or not, and the seventh one speaks directly to this matter. It calls for governing with a balanced approach, rejecting both government overreach and government absence, providing essential services, measuring results, ending what fails, and enforcing fiscal discipline.
For a candidate, that means no proposal goes public without a funding plan attached to it, and the numbers have to add up where voters can see them. Visit centercratic.party to see all nine principles and how they protect our democracy.
Supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America platform may respond that this is strictly a platform, a wish list and not a budget, and that the Democrats and the Republicans do not put real price tags on their promises either. In full disclosure, Cato opposes socialism, and Michel called his own estimate rough.
All of that is true, and none of it lets the DSA off the hook. The only people who could tell the country what these programs cost are the people who wrote them, and they never tried. When outside estimates run from $27.5 trillion to $212 trillion, that is not a disagreement over details. That is the difference between a plan and a wish.
How could we possibly give the Democratic Socialists of America license to govern this country when they have not demonstrated even the slightest fiscal responsibility for the programs they are proposing? The Treasury Department reported this month that the national debt has passed $40 trillion, and the cost of even one of these programs, if it is not handled with great care, would be catastrophic on top of that.
How could we?
Great piece.