Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The Democratic party’s “Green New Deal” 10-year plan has been widely ridiculed as impossible and unaffordable. To understand just how thoroughly disconnected it is from reality, one needs to look at the numbers. Here we calculate the cost of the main big ticket items in the proposal.

Transportation

For high speed rail to be “at a scale where air travel stops being necessary” it has to carry the same amount of traffic: 684 billion passenger-miles per year, 742 million passengers per year. That is about 23 times what Amtrak handles today. A century ago, the USA had about 254,000 miles of track; that may be sufficient even though the population has more than tripled since then. Construction costs for California’s Rail to Nowhere are currently estimated at $89 million per mile, which means the Green plan would cost $22.6 trillion. We’d also need around 5000 new trains, at a total cost of about $445 billion.

Switching to electric cars adds about 300 billion kWh energy demand; electric trucks about the same. Together they add about 20 percent to the total power use. But the lithium for all those batteries adds up to 21 times the world-wide production of all lithium mines combined.

“Medicare for all”

Tucked away in the Green plan as an aside is “Medicare for all”. If we accept Sen. Sanders’s optimistic estimate that will cost $14 trillion for the 10-year plan.

“Economic security”

The plan calls for “economic security” for those “unable or unwilling to work”. Of those not in the labor market, about 20 million are working age and not students. Add 6 million currently unemployed; if “economic security” is the proposed minimum wage, that is $6.2 trillion over the 10-year plan.

Infrastructure

The Green plan proposes to spend $4.6 trillion dollars (“minimum”) on infrastructure over the 10 year plan.

Electricity

Current electrical generation is about 1000 gigawatts. Electric transportation adds about 20 percent. If we assume half of that is solar power and half is wind power, the Green plan cost for generation is about $2.3 trillion. That’s undoubtedly optimistic because both are intermittent, and the actual cost will be higher to pay for energy storage or backup generation of some kind.

Building upgrade

The Green plan calls for upgrading or replacing “every building”. If 95% of the 135 million housing units can be upgraded, at $5000 average, that costs $640 billion. Replacing the other 5% at $100,000 each costs $675 billion. There are about 5 million commercial buildings; if 95% can be retrofitted for $25,000 and 5% needs replacing at $1 million, that’s another $120 billion plus $250, for a total “upgrade” cost of $1.7 trillion.

The bottom line

There are more parts to the Green 10-year plan, though the ones listed here are probably the big ticket items. Many of the estimates come from current private industry figures, making them wildly optimistic for government-run programs.

The items shown here add up to $51 trillion for the 10-year plan, or $5.1 trillion per year. Current US Federal revenue is about $3.3 trillion, so the plan would result in a government budget about 2.5 times as large as today. Most of that would have to come from individual income taxes, which are $1.7 trillion today. In other words, just the optimistic estimates of these parts of the Green plan would make your average taxes go up to four times what they are today.

The numbers shown here are optimistic for several reasons. Some costs are not shown, for example subsidies needed for railroad operation. And they assume the economy will keep humming with very low unemployment.

There are consequences of the Green Deal that are not expressed in money. For example, half a million wind mills will kill a large number of birds every year.

Some of the politicians who have endorsed the Green Deal have tried to walk back their endorsement with the claim that “it is only aspirational”. What does that mean? Do they only “aspire” to quadruple our taxes? Does it mean they will settle for less, at least to begin with? Even if they would settle for just one-third of the grandiose plan, that still translates into doubling our taxes.