The DSA’s socialist plans carry a $212T price tag — and every one of us will pay

It started in New York, but now democratic socialism is on a winning streak around the country.

Months after Zohran Mamdani became mayor, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America nearly swept the city’s June Democratic primaries.

In Florida, DSA member Angie Nixon won the Democratic Senate nomination over the establishment favorite.

And it’s not just the DSA’s own candidates: Socialist ideas are being laundered into the mainstream Democratic Party. 

In the upper Midwest, Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan rode Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement to win Democratic Senate primaries, campaigning on Medicare for All and expansive Green New Deal-like policies.

They insist these sweeping expansions of government shouldn’t be called socialism, but both are key pieces of the agenda socialists are selling to America.   

So I took the DSA platform — dubbed “A Day Without Capitalism,” it’s long on rhetoric and thin on details — and tallied up the costs. 

The bottom line: The DSA wants somewhere between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade.

At the high end, total government spending could consume as much as 92% of America’s entire economic output. 

The DSA’s “no more bills” pitch is clearly enticing to Americans frustrated with high and rising prices. 

The socialists claim their plan will do away with rent.

They’ll make health care free and forgive student loans.

Their system will provide utilities, college and food at no cost to the consumer.  

However, making something free at the point of use simply shifts the cost somewhere else — in this case, to taxpayers.

Even with the government in charge, things still have to be paid for. 

Medicare-for-All-style health care needs doctors, nurses, hospitals and medicines; universal health care alone could cost $40 trillion to $70 trillion over a decade.

A federal jobs guarantee means paying as much as $60 trillion to cover 10 years of wages for millions of Americans, and eliminating rents and mortgages requires trillions more in subsidies.

Replacing fossil fuels will take massive new infrastructure investments — and no-cost colleges still need professors. 

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. 

Socialists have a reassuring answer: Rich people and corporations will pay.

But are there enough of them? 

Start with the super-rich. The 400 wealthiest Americans were worth a combined $6.6 trillion last year.

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. 

What about corporations? Tax every dollar of corporate profits at 100% (assuming the businesses keep operating), and they’ll fund between half and one-fifth of the DSA agenda.  

Finally, jack up top income taxes to their revenue-maximizing rate on high-income earners: That covers less than 1% of what the DSA has proposed. 

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 costs of its promises.

Only one tax base is large enough to fill a gap tens of trillions of dollars wide: the middle class. 

Large European welfare states don’t fund themselves by soaking only billionaires and corporations; Europe’s tax rates on corporate income and billionaires are often lower than in the United States.

Instead, they’re funded with broad-based taxes on workers and consumers — high income taxes, high payroll taxes and high consumption taxes.

Middle-class Europeans pay tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes than Americans do.  

And even Europe’s largest governments, with annual outlays at the low end of the DSA’s spending estimates, stop well short of the DSA’s anti-market vision. 

In France and Finland, people still get bills.

They pay rent, and they buy groceries and energy.

They pay for transportation, their health care requires cost-sharing, and income limits and eligibility rules apply to other subsidies.

This is the real role of a socialist government: Without prices, bureaucrats ration access through waiting lists, complex criteria, lower quality, lotteries, geographic restrictions or political favoritism.

Expect to see such rationing in Mamdani’s grocery stores, with price discounts comparable to Aldi — and a $70 million price tag. 

The DSA promises a world of plenty, paid for by somebody else.

Simple math says otherwise.

There aren’t enough resources at the top to pay for socialism — which is why the bill will eventually come due for the rest of us. 

Adam Michel is the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute and author of the Liberty Taxed Substack.