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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

(*) Full article: https://redstate.com/kyle-becker/2026/08/12/the-dsa-price-tag-for-socialism-in-america-200-trillion-in-new-debt-n2205550