Correction: A typo in CEI’s original report led to inflated data from the study by one order of magnitude (for example, trillion instead of billion), including the number provided in the original headline of this article. The article has been revised to reflect the accurate numbers.
By nearly every estimate, the Green New Deal environmental plan pushed by Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would carry a hefty price tag — one study put the cost at $51 trillion, another at $93 trillion.
A new study released jointly by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Power the Future on Tuesday found that state-by-state case the GND would rack up crippling costs. The state of Pennsylvania, for example, would need to spend $1 trillion to upgrade residential, commercial and industrial buildings as mandated in the GND, and Florida would need to pony up $1.4 trillion, according to the study.
“The Green New Deal is a radical blueprint to de-carbonize the American economy by refashioning how we grow food, move people and goods, source and distribute electricity, and build the structures where we live, work, and play. Our analysis shows that, if implemented, the Green New Deal would cost for American households at least tens of thousands of dollars annually on a permanent basis,” CEI President and CEO Kent Lassman said in a statement.
“Perhaps that’s why exactly zero Senate Democrats, including the resolution’s 12 co-sponsors, voted for the Green New Deal when they had the chance.”
Some other massive price tags include $352.8 billion for New Mexico, $533.4 billion for Alaska and New Hampshire at $102.8 billion.
To put the astronomical numbers in perspective, the United States national debt is $22 trillion.
The study also found that average Americans would be forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars. “Each household in five model states – Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania – will be on the hook for more than $70,000 in increased costs for electricity, upgrading vehicles and housing, and shipping in just the first year under the Green New Deal,” the study said.
Under the GND plan, Ocasio-Cortez proposes eliminating all fossil-fuel-powered electricity. That would shutter all coal and natural gas power plants across the United States, costing hundred of thousands of jobs. The plan also calls for getting rid of all gas-powered cars — in 10 years.
What’s more, the plan sets out a guarantee for every American to have a job, pledging to “provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
According to the Green New Deal, the program also plans to “mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low income, deindustrialized or other marginalized communities in such a way that builds wealth and ownership at the community level).”
And the draft plan says paying for the massive program “shall be accomplished by the federal government, using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate.”
A study co-authored by the former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the total cost for the first decade would be $93 trillion.
But the authors of the latest study warned that they may have underestimated the staggering cost.
“Most provisions of the GND are so broad and open-ended that the list of potential programs necessary to implement the program is limited by the capacity of legislators to imagine a new government program,” Lassman and co-author Daniel Turner wrote. “Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the whole or maximum cost of the GND.”