Incoming member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an embarrassing error over the weekend, in which she claimed that roughly two-thirds of the $32 trillion projected cost of extending Medicare coverage to everybody could be paid for simply by targeting Pentagon fraud. In reality, her math was egregiously off.
“$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained.’ $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon. And that’s before our premiums,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.”
$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T.
That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.
And that’s before our premiums. https://t.co/soT6GSmDSG
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 2, 2018
The source of her claim was a report in the liberal Nation magazine, which ran a piece about gaps in Pentagon accounting involving $21 trillion in transactions over 18 years.
There are multiple reasons the Ocasio-Cortez tweet is absurd.
For one, even if the piece is taken at face value, it doesn’t suggest what Ocasio-Cortez claims. The figure cited had to do with the accounting for inflows and outflows within the Pentagon budget, meaning that the same dollar could be accounted for many times. It does not mean there were trillions of dollars that the Pentagon spent on pure fraud that otherwise could have been spent on other national priorities.
During the period of time mentioned (1998-2015), just over $9 trillion was spent in total on defense, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s historical budget data. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl went even further — noting that defense spending during the entire existence of the United States dating back to 1789 totaled $18 trillion.
Also, the estimate that extending Medicare to everybody would increase federal spending by $32 trillion (which comes from the liberal Urban Institute among other studies), is over 10 years, whereas the Pentagon spending cited by Ocasio-Cortez is over 18 years.
In reality, the CBO projects the federal government will spend just under $7 trillion on defense over the next decade (2019-2028), meaning that if the entire Pentagon budget were zeroed out tomorrow, it would still leave Ocasio-Cortez $25 trillion short. Put another way, getting rid of the U.S. military budget would only cover about one-fifth of extending Medicare to everybody over the next 10 years.
As for the broader idea that we’re somehow shortchanging healthcare, the CBO projects that over the same ten-year period the federal government will be spending $7 trillion on defense, it is going to spend more than double — nearly $17 trillion — on major healthcare programs led by Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The $21 trillion number should have given pause to anybody with the most basic understanding of federal budgeting. The fact that Ocasio-Cortez promoted the idea that slashing Pentagon fraud could mostly pay for “Medicare for all,” and further that the tweet is now approaching 67,000 likes, says something about the fantasy world that socialists are living in, and their lack of understanding of the enormous trade-offs involved in instituting their agenda.
