The Democratic Socialists of America want to give you free healthcare, free college, free housing, a guaranteed government job, and paid family leave. The Cato Institute ran the numbers. The tab comes to somewhere between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new federal spending over ten years.
That's not a typo. And no, they don't have the money.
Adam Michel, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, published the analysis this month, and the math is the kind of thing that should be printed on billboards outside every DSA chapter in America. The DSA platform — the actual platform, not the campaign trail version — calls for government-funded healthcare, housing, higher education, and electricity, plus a federal jobs guarantee, expanded retirement benefits, universal paid family leave, massive green-energy spending, and reparations. All of it funded by "the richest individuals and corporations," according to the DSA.
Small problem. The 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a combined $6.6 trillion. Seize every last dollar — every yacht, every stock certificate, every mansion — and you cover somewhere between 3 and 9 percent of the bill. That's not a funding plan. That's a rounding error dressed up as class warfare.
Michel put it plainly: "The only sustainable way to fund a government of this size is with high taxes on everyone." Not the rich. Not corporations. Everyone. The low-end estimate alone would push total government spending to 57 percent of GDP. The high end? Ninety-two percent of GDP. Current U.S. government spending sits at 38 percent. The DSA wants to more than double it.
For context, Sweden — the poster child the democratic socialists love to wave around at dinner parties — taxes its citizens at 43 percent of GDP. And Sweden ranks 12th in welfare outcomes according to a 2025 study by the Institute of Economic Affairs that examined 23 wealthy nations. The countries that actually rank highest for citizen welfare — Japan, South Korea, Switzerland — have tax burdens between 26 and 32 percent of GDP. Turns out the "be more like Scandinavia" crowd picked the wrong Scandinavians.
Nima Sanandaji, President of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform, has studied the Nordic model extensively. His conclusion isn't what the DSA puts on its brochures. "The income equality of Nordic countries has never been the result of the welfare state," Sanandaji said. He went further, drawing on personal experience: "For me it felt like the welfare state just sucks out responsibility and makes you dependent."
But the DSA's own website isn't shy about the vision. "Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism," it reads. "You have no debt. You don't need health insurance." It's a nice fantasy. So is winning the lottery.
Medicare-for-All alone carries a price tag of $40 to $75 trillion over ten years, per the Cato analysis. Stack on the jobs guarantee, the housing guarantee, free college, reparations, and the green-energy buildout, and you're looking at a spending level that would make the Soviet Politburo blush. Projected federal tax collection over that same decade is roughly $70 trillion — meaning the DSA's high-end plan costs three times what the entire federal government expects to collect.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once called democratic socialism "one of the few places in the Democrat Party offering an affirmative vision." She's right about one thing — it is affirmative. It affirmatively promises things that cannot be paid for, funded by people who don't have the money, administered by a government that can't run a post office without losing billions.
The Nordic countries the DSA idolizes charge a 20 percent value-added tax on top of already steep income taxes. That's a tax on groceries, clothing, and gas — the stuff working families buy every week. That's the part that never makes it into the campaign speech.
The "be more like Sweden" argument is still valid. It just doesn't mean what it used to.