The DSA's Price Tag for Socialism in America: $200 Trillion

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have a plan for America. There is one tiny problem: They need to figure out who is going to pay for it.

A new analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute puts some numbers behind the DSA's sprawling economic platform, and they are staggering: somewhere between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in additional federal spending over 10 years.

That's not a typo. At the high end, we're talking about more than $200 trillion.

The DSA platform calls for government-funded healthcare, housing, higher education and electricity, along with a federal jobs guarantee, expanded retirement benefits, universal paid family leave, massive green-energy spending and reparations.

Cato tried to attach plausible price tags to nine of the largest proposals and came up with an enormous price tag.

Medicare-for-All-style proposals for universal healthcare would increase federal spending by $40 trillion to $75 trillion over 10 years. Reparations, a federal jobs guarantee, infrastructure, green energy investment, larger retirement benefits, free housing, paid family leave, and no-cost college would increase spending by tens of trillions of dollars more. In total, the DSA’s new spending would cost between $71 trillion and $212 trillion over the next decade.

The estimate isn't a formal government score, and Cato itself stresses that the exercise is necessarily rough because the DSA platform often describes goals rather than detailed legislation. There can also be overlap among programs. But that's precisely why Cato presents a range rather than pretending it can calculate the bill down to the dollar.

Put another way, Cato calculates that these new programs alone would amount to somewhere between 18 percent and 53 percent of GDP. Add them to the government Americans already have, and total government spending could exceed 57 percent of GDP under the low-end scenario.

At the high end, Cato estimates it could approach 92 percent of GDP — higher than Sweden, Denmark, and even France.

Cato notes that the 400 wealthiest Americans had a combined wealth of roughly $6.6 trillion in 2025. You could theoretically confiscate every penny they owned — their companies, investments, homes and everything else — and it would cover only about nine percent of Cato's low-end estimate. And then you've run out of billionaires to confiscate.

Corporations don't solve the problem, either. Cato estimates domestic corporate profits after federal taxes at about $35 trillion over the coming decade. Even if Washington somehow seized every additional dollar of corporate profit for ten straight years, the money would cover only about half of the low-end DSA estimate and roughly 17 percent of the high-end estimate.

Obviously, companies wouldn't continue operating normally if the government confiscated 100 percent of their profits, which illustrates how fantastical the exercise becomes.

The federal government is projected to collect about $70 trillion over the decade from the entire existing federal tax system. Cato's upper estimate for the DSA's additional spending is three times that amount. And Washington is already deeply in the red.

That's the dirty little secret behind welfare states. Eventually you run out of rich people. And the DSA's economic ambitions deserve considerably more attention now because the organization and its ideological fellow travelers are no longer some irrelevant collection of college Marxists arguing about theory in a basement.

Just look at what happened when centrist House Democrats circulated their remarkably mild "Promise to America." One of its declarations was simply: "We are capitalist, not socialist."

Only a tiny fraction of House Democrats signed it. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) didn't merely decline. She attacked the project and argued that "democratic socialism" was one of the few places in the Democrat Party offering an affirmative vision.

Under the DSA's plan, the government's command of the economy would begin looking less like a modern European welfare state and more like the degree of state control associated with Soviet-style economies.

As I've argued before, much of the DSA agenda doesn't resemble "classic socialism," anyway. It isn't a push for a "Scandinavian welfare state," a misleading proposal because we are talking about export-led economies whose defense spending is subsidized by NATO.

The DSA platform goes far beyond expanding the welfare state. It calls for abolishing ICE, ending immigration detention and deportations, granting amnesty regardless of immigration status, and eliminating visa caps and quotas.

This is the road to full-blown communism. You are simultaneously proposing an enormous expansion of government benefits while dramatically expanding eligibility to live in the country. You want government guarantees for housing, healthcare, employment, and education while removing many of the mechanisms by which the government limits immigration.

You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to spot the issue. The DSA's policies wouldn't just make government larger. If taken together, they would destroy America as we know it.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.

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