By The Democratic Socialists of America have a remarkably simple answer to nearly every economic problem: make the government pay for it.
Health care. Housing. College. Electricity. Retirement. Paid leave. Jobs. Green energy. Reparations.
In the DSA’s imagined socialist future, the organization tells Americans, “Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore.”
Someone, of course, still has to pay them.
A new analysis from Cato Institute tax scholar Adam N. Michel attempts to put a price tag on just nine of the DSA’s largest promises. His estimate: between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade.
And despite the DSA’s insistence that the tab can be dumped on “the richest individuals and corporations,” Michel finds there is not remotely enough wealth at the top to finance the socialist wish list.
The math eventually leads somewhere DSA rarely advertises: the American middle class.
The $212 Trillion Socialist Wish List
The numbers are almost difficult to comprehend.
Michel estimates a Medicare-for-All-style health care system alone would require between $40 trillion and $75 trillion in additional federal spending over ten years. Add reparations, a federal jobs guarantee, publicly funded housing, free college, expanded retirement benefits, paid family leave, infrastructure and green-energy programs, and the total climbs to somewhere between $71 trillion and $212 trillion.
And those are not policies Michel invented and attributed to socialists.
The DSA’s own 2026 program calls for free public education through college, cancellation of student debt, universal health care at no cost to individuals, publicly owned housing, universal rent control, reparations, a federal jobs guarantee, massive publicly owned energy investments and the phasing out of fossil fuels. It also calls for public ownership of the nation’s largest corporations and essential industries.
The organization describes a future in which Americans have no mortgage or landlord, retirement is publicly funded, and food, education, medicine, energy and transportation cease to operate as for-profit businesses.
Michel cautions that his estimates are necessarily broad. Some programs could overlap with existing spending, reducing the total. On the other hand, the estimates do not fully capture behavioral changes or broader economic damage caused by taxes and government intervention on this scale.
Even the low-end number is extraordinary.
Federal, state and local governments already consume nearly 40 percent of U.S. GDP. Michel calculates that the low-end version of the DSA agenda would push total government spending above 57 percent of GDP, higher than nearly every major industrialized country.
The European Union averages about 49 percent. Finland, one of Europe’s biggest-spending governments, sits around 58 percent.
The high-end DSA scenario would push government spending to roughly 92 percent of GDP.
That is not Sweden.
As Michel notes, no comparable modern country spends anything close to that share of its economy. At that point, government’s claim on national output begins looking less like a European welfare state and more like the level of state control associated with Soviet-style economic systems.
Just Confiscate the Billionaires
DSA’s answer is predictable: tax the rich.
Again, there is a math problem.
The federal government is projected to collect about $70 trillion in revenue from 2027 through 2036. The Congressional Budget Office separately projects roughly $24.4 trillion in deficits over that period under current law.
So Washington is already spending far more than it collects before a single new DSA promise is added.
Michel then performs an experiment that should be devastating to the idea that billionaires can simply fund everything.
The 400 wealthiest Americans collectively held about $6.6 trillion in wealth in 2025. Suppose Washington confiscated all of it.
Not taxed some of it.
All of it.
Every stock. Every company. Every investment. Every dollar.
Michel calculates that the haul would cover only about 9 percent of the low-end DSA funding requirement and 3 percent of the high-end estimate.
Then there would be nothing left to confiscate the following year.
The calculation is actually generous to DSA because attempting to liquidate trillions of dollars in assets simultaneously would almost certainly drive their market value downward.
Fine. Take corporate profits too.
Cato estimates domestic corporations will generate approximately $35 trillion in after-tax profits over the next decade. Seizing every dollar of corporate profit would cover only about half the low-end DSA estimate and 17 percent of the high-end estimate.
That fantasy also requires believing businesses would continue investing, hiring workers and producing goods after being informed that their owners would be permitted to keep exactly zero dollars in profit.
Apparently even socialism has trouble defeating arithmetic.
There Is No Secret Vault of Rich-People Money
Maybe Washington could simply crank income-tax rates on wealthy Americans high enough to close the gap.
That does not work either.
Michel points to research by economists working for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation examining the revenue-maximizing top income-tax rate. Their research finds that behavioral responses increasingly erode the tax base as rates rise, meaning there is a point where higher rates produce little or no additional revenue. The authors find the top-rate revenue curve considerably flatter than simplistic calculations suggest.
Michel estimates that pushing top federal rates to their theoretical revenue-maximizing level would raise less than 0.1 percent of GDP — roughly $400 billion over a decade.
Against a $71 trillion to $212 trillion spending plan, that is essentially loose change.
Michel then combines the confiscation fantasies: take all the wealth of America’s 400 richest people, seize every dollar of corporate profit and impose revenue-maximizing income-tax rates on high earners.
DSA would still be short between $29 trillion and $169 trillion.
At some point, even Bernie Sanders runs out of billionaires.
Then They Come for the Middle Class
There is a reason European welfare states impose substantial taxes on ordinary workers.
They have to.
France and Finland do not finance large governments exclusively with taxes on billionaires and multinational corporations. They rely on broad income taxes, payroll taxes and consumption taxes paid throughout the income distribution.
DSA would face the same reality — only on a far larger scale.
Michel calculates that funding the high-end DSA agenda while covering existing projected deficits would require turning every $1 Washington currently collects into approximately $4.36.
Applied mechanically to current federal income-tax rates, the 24 percent bracket would rise above 100 percent and the highest marginal rate would exceed 160 percent.
Those rates obviously could not function in the real world. People would work less, restructure businesses, shift investments and find ways to avoid taxable activity long before government collected the theoretical revenue.
That is the point.
The DSA platform is not merely an unusually expensive collection of progressive programs. At its upper end, it collides with the practical limits of taxation itself.
And the economic program is only part of what DSA now proposes.
Its official platform says complete victory will require building “a new society from the ground up.” It calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the president and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress, taking the largest corporations into public ownership and moving toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.”
That should put the $212 trillion price tag in perspective.
DSA is not offering Americans Denmark with a few extra government benefits. It is openly proposing a wholesale reconstruction of American economic and political life while assuring voters that someone richer will pick up the check.
Cato’s recent analysis exposes the problem with that promise.
There are not enough billionaires. There are not enough corporate profits. There is not some hidden mountain of money waiting to be seized.
Eventually socialism runs out of other people’s rich people.
Then it sends the bill to everyone else
