Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t exactly known for their practicality. But their latest proposal is a doozy, even for them.
On Thursday, the legislators teamed up to release the “Green New Deal for Public Housing Act,” a bill laying out the housing-specific portion of Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous $93 trillion Green New Deal. According to the Washington Post, “the bill … would use seven grant programs to upgrade housing units into carbon-neutral communities with organic grocery stores, on-site child care and community gardens” [emphasis added].
Even progressive estimates from the left-wing think tank Data for Progress peg the cost of this overhaul at up to $172 billion. Let’s be honest, it’s probably more — this same think tank called the $93 trillion Green New Deal “financially feasible” — yet even taking their friendly estimate at face value, that’s still nearly $175,000 in taxpayer money spent per public housing unit (there are approximately 1 million). I suppose this is a bit more realistic than Ocasio-Cortez’s original promise to retrofit every building in America, but it’s still preposterous.
There’s no doubt that many of our public-housing units could use repairs or upgrades. A bill to address necessary repairs would not be unreasonable. But at roughly $175,000 per unit, we might as well just build new units altogether. Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are asking taxpayers to take on a $180 billion burden — aka, asking every taxpayer in the country to pay an additional $1,200 or so — so public housing can have organic grocery stores and community gardens.
These people cannot be serious. Those luxuries would be nice. But they would not be worth burdening taxpayers with billions of dollars of new debt or higher taxes.
The usefulness of making public housing “carbon-neutral” is not apparent. Yes, broadly, we need to cut down on carbon emissions globally to stave off the effects of climate change. But even if you could magically make the U.S. halt all emissions tomorrow, emissions from China and India — which show no sign of stopping any time soon — would keep the world on course toward global warming. With that in mind, it’s hard to see how such a small but incredibly expensive feat such as carbon-neutral public housing is worth it.
Still, Ocasio-Cortez tries to make the case for her proposal in economic terms, touting the Data for Progress estimate that the plan will create 240,000 jobs and arguing “we can create millions of jobs in this country by actually rising to the challenge of addressing what this crisis is going to represent.”
In trying to make an economic, jobs-focused case for useless big-government programs, Ocasio-Cortez falls into a classic economic fallacy. (Yes, this is a common habit of hers.)
First, she’s ignoring that the large increase in taxes to fund the plan would inevitably slow economic growth and kill jobs, so that offset must be accounted for. Additionally, the congresswoman mistakenly thinks that you can create jobs just by keeping people busy, and it’s the same economically as any other form of job creation in more productive areas.
As the libertarian economist Milton Friedman loved to explain, this simply isn’t how it works.
Economics is, at its root, concerned with the allocation of scarce resources to their most productive uses. “Spending isn’t good. … What we want to have is goods and services,” Friedman said. And what Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t seem to understand is that from the standpoint of economic growth, a dollar spent on building publicly owned “community gardens” is simply not the same as a dollar spent in cutting-edge private-sector innovation.
All in all, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have once again displayed how inept and unserious their proposals are. Let’s just hope their ideas don’t catch on any further, before our taxes have to go up to pay for organic grocery stores and socialist fever dreams.
