The policy agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) would cost between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in fresh spending over a decade, according to a new analysis.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has had electoral success recently, with some candidates backed by the DSA advancing in primaries in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City.
Angie Nixon, a DSA member in Florida, won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Progressives who have touted similar policies as those in the DSA platform have also found recent success in Democratic primaries for U.S. Senate races, with Abdul El-Sayed winning in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan prevailing in Minnesota.
Adam Michel, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote in the New York Post that the “DSA promises a world of plenty, paid for by somebody else. Simple math says otherwise.”
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Michel analyzed the DSA platform and found that while the platform is “thin on details,” he was able to estimate the spending policies would total between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade.
He noted that, at the high end of that estimate, the total government spending would reach as high as 92% of U.S. economic output.
“The socialists claim their plan will do away with rent. They’ll make healthcare free and forgive student loans. Their system will provide utilities, college and food at no cost to the consumer,” Michel wrote.
“However, making something free at the point of use simply shifts the cost somewhere else, in this case, to taxpayers.”
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Michel said universal healthcare could cost $40 trillion to $70 trillion over the course of a decade as reforms modeled off a Medicare-for-all-like healthcare system would see the government take on costs like paying for doctors and nurses as well as operating medical facilities.
Another plank in the DSA platform, a federal jobs guarantee, would cost up to $60 trillion to cover the wages of millions of American workers over a decade, according to Michel, who added that the elimination of rent or mortgages as part of a housing guarantee would cost trillions.
“Washington is currently projected to collect about $70 trillion in federal taxes over the next 10 years. To cover the costs of all those additional services, the DSA agenda requires roughly doubling federal revenue at the low end and quadrupling it at the high end,” Michel wrote.
The DSA platform calls for enacting “aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.”
He said that while advocates of those spending plans claim that they will be able to use higher taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations to pay for them, they would likely come up short.
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The 400 wealthiest billionaires in America were worth an estimated $6.6 trillion last year, according to a Forbes analysis, which Michel noted would be insufficient to cover the DSA agenda.
“Imagine Washington could confiscate every dollar of that — liquidate their businesses, sell their homes, strip off their jewelry. All that covers less than one year of the low-end cost of the DSA’s platform – or not quite four months of it at the high end,” he wrote.
Taxing every dollar of corporate profits at 100% would fund between half and one-fifth of the DSA agenda, according to Michel, while hiking income taxes on high-income earners would cover less than 1% of those spending plans.
“Add it all together — confiscate the wealth of the richest Americans, seize every dollar of corporate profit and maximize top income-tax rates — and the DSA is still between $29 trillion and $169 trillion short of covering the cost of its promises,” Michel wrote.
He added that only “one tax base is large enough to fill a gap tens of trillions of dollars wide: the middle class,” noting that the European middle class has a significantly higher tax burden than its American counterpart to finance those countries’ social welfare programs.
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