“Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism,” reads the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) website.
“You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities,” it continues.
Sounds pretty good, right? Conveniently, the DSA fails to mention how much it would cost to create this socialist utopia. Unsurprisingly, it would be a lot of money.
This week, Adam Michel, director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, added up nine of the largest proposals in the DSA platform. Based on his estimates, the proposals would require between $71 trillion and $212 trillion—which represents 18 percent and 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), respectively—in additional government spending.
In the U.S., government spending already makes up about 38 percent of GDP, which is relatively high by historical standards but low compared to the rest of the world. Under a high-end estimate of the DSA’s agenda, that 38 percent would rise to 92 percent of GDP, according to Michel. A lower-end estimate would raise spending to more than 57 percent of GDP, higher than most European countries.
No major advanced economy spends anything close to 92 percent of GDP. This level of expenditure would require the mass confiscation of private property, handing an unprecedented amount of power to politicians. These estimates are, as Michel tells Reason, “much closer to estimates of state control under Soviet-style communism than to today’s European welfare states.”
Hellbound and Down 