The just-released cost estimate of $93 trillion for the Green New Deal is the kind of price tag that would have any rational consumer desperately exiting the showroom as fast as they can.
You read that right. A new study from the American Action Forum, which is run by a former head of the Congressional Budget Office, pegs the 10-year cost of the utopian lunacy known as the Green New Deal at more than four times the gross domestic product of the United States.
Nonetheless, the bill’s supporters are undeterred. What’s $93 trillion, they ask, when the world is going to end in 12 years?
The Green New Deal isn’t just the forlorn hope of some fringe element in Congress either. It’s a major legislative initiative with a large and growing base of support in the Democratic Party.
The bill introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., already has 89 co-sponsors. The Senate companion bill introduced by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., has 11 co-sponsors, including presidential hopefuls Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Cory Booker, D-N.J.
[Related: Senate Democrats backtrack on Green New Deal, ask for a vote to affirm climate change is real]
The Democrats’ ill-informed base is rabidly enthusiastic about it, too — so much so that a mob descended on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office to demand action on the Green New Deal, even though the Kentucky Republican has already announced he will put the measure to a vote in the Senate.
Obviously, the vote is a ploy by McConnell to get the Democrats, especially the ones running for president, to go on the record either to support a ridiculous, economy-wrecking plan or to demonstrate rational thinking that will be perceived as a betrayal by their voting base. But that hasn’t stopped leading members of the liberal pundit class from encouraging Democrats to commit political suicide by piling on their support for something so obviously unworkable.
The undecided Democrats in the Senate must envy Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who, from her sheltered position in control of the lower house of Congress can casually dismiss what she hilariously called “the green dream or whatever.”
Truthfully, the Green New Deal ought to be an albatross around the neck of any Democratic politician or liberal pundit silly enough to lend it their seal of approval.
Even if it were somehow possible to afford the Green New Deal’s enormous price tag, it would inflict a severe human cost in the form of declining standards of living, increased government control over nearly every aspect of the economy, and the evaporation of personal liberty that would far outstrip even the considerable financial expense.
Guaranteed government jobs for all, for instance, is an innocent-sounding way of enabling the massive subsidization of make-work projects.
Another example is the idea of achieving “net-zero” carbon emissions in 10 years, which would result in forfeiting the comforts and freedoms that industrial society affords us.
AOC, Markey, and the other Green New Dealers are operating under the illusion that some unspecified “someone else,” presumably the billionaires they’re constantly denigrating, will bear all of the burdens for the rest of society. They are sorely mistaken.
Even AOC herself admits as much, in her own way. The food choices you now enjoy, which Ocasio-Cortez flippantly calls “eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” and “factory farming” are something we’d have to “take a look at” and “address” (i.e., “eliminate”) in a post-Green New Deal world.
Apocalyptic global warming hysteria gets significantly more sinister than just banning hamburgers, though. In a recent livestream, AOC declared it “legitimate” to pose the “basic moral question” of whether it’s “OK to still have children” in a world with carbon emissions.
Of course, Americans would be hard-pressed to afford either children or hamburgers if they were forced to shoulder the $93 trillion price tag of the Green New Deal.
You’d think sticker shock over the extraordinary cost of the Green New Deal would serve as a signal to the Democrats that their policy proposal is sheer lunacy, but unfortunately the price tag of their “green dream” isn’t one of those things they’re willing to “take a look at.”
Jenna Ellis (@realJennaEllis) is a member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Board. She is a constitutional law attorney, radio host, and the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
