AOC’s Green New Deal estimated to cost $93 trillion

The left and right tend to believe that money grows on trees – or, you can print, tax, and borrow to fund extravagances. The left wants to spend egregious sums of tax dollars on progressive cause du jours, while the right wants to transfer the fruits of your labor on some foreign excursion.

The latest boondoggle in the making is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)’s fantasy Green New Deal that she thinks will save the world, despite her prediction that the world is ending in 12 years (SEE: AOC: The world will end in 12 years, math-based algorithms are racist). Suddenly, many Democrats are proclaiming that the GND is ready for primetime and is on par with fighting Nazis and taking a trip to the moon.

But can the U.S. afford this grand vision?

Let’s put it this way: the federal government can’t even afford the Old New Deal, let alone a second incarnation.

According to the American Action Forum, a think tank run by former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, AOC’s proposal would cost the American people between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10 years.

“The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive,” the group said in its analysis. “It’s further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”

Yikes.

More from Bloomberg:

The so-called Green New Deal may tally between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10-years, concludes the Republican-aligned American Action Forum, which is run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who directed the non-partisan CBO from 2003 to 2005.

That includes between $8.3 trillion and $12.3 trillion to meet the plan’s call to eliminate carbon emissions from the power and transportation sectors and between $42.8 trillion and $80.6 trillion for its economic agenda including providing jobs and health care for all.

….

Backers of the plan say cost of inaction would be more expensive. The resolution itself, released earlier this month by Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey points to a major report on global warming released by the United Nations last October that says catastrophic climate change could cost more than $500 billion annually in lost economic output in the U.S. by 2100.

Of course, those in favor of the GND are rejecting any analysis and accuse detractors of working for Big Oil, like Markey did:

“Any so-called ‘analysis’ of the #GreenNewDeal that includes artificially inflated numbers that rely on lazy assumptions, incl. about policies that aren’t even in the resolution is bogus,” Markey said on Twitter. “Putting a price on a resolution of principles, not policies, is just Big Oil misinformation.”

The GND is nothing but a communist Green Dream.