Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tried to launch an attack on Democrats’ insanely expensive socialist spending proposals, but instead made an embarrassing math error that actually dramatically understated their cost.
“The same Democrats who said we couldn’t afford $5 billion for border security want to spend 20 TIMES as much on their socialist agenda,” she wrote in a since deleted (and later corrected) tweet. “Govt-run health care & the ‘Green New Deal’ would cost upwards of $100 TRILLION. We need national security, not more nationalized programs.”
In reality, 20 times $5 billion is merely $100 billion, which wouldn’t even be a rounding error when compared with $100 trillion. The correct number would actually be 20,000 times, which would have been a much more potent attack had McDaniel (or the relevant RNC staffer) actually known how basic math works.
In terms of the estimate, though it’s merely a draft resolution that’s difficult to score, the right-of-center American Action Forum recently projected the Green New Deal would cost $51 trillion to $93 trillion over a decade. Most of the variance comes from alternate assumptions about what the job guarantee program would actually turn out to be.
Beyond exposing the ignorance of RNC staff, the McDaniel error does speak to some of the difficulty of trying to convey the cost of many Democratic proposals. Once you get into the billions, people have difficulty contemplating how much difference there is between numbers. Most people don’t understand that proportionally, the difference between a billion and a trillion is the difference between having $100 in the bank and having $100,000. Billions and trillions just blend together as representing a ton of money.
This is why Democrats may actually get away with talking points such as: Republicans didn’t pay for their tax cut, so why should we have to detail how we’re going to pay for free healthcare for everybody? The obvious follow up — that there’s a substantial difference between $1.5 trillion in tax cuts and $32 trillion in new spending — will be lost on most people. It comes across as, Republicans did that expensive thing, so why can’t we do this expensive thing?
RNC should be dedicating itself to educating people on why this is significantly different and finding innovative ways to convey to people the staggering cost of socialism. Instead, they are just adding to the ignorance.
