The national debt crossed $40 trillion last week, yet few in Washington seem serious about cutting spending. Meanwhile, the increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America continue promising Americans ever more expansive entitlements, policies that would push an already staggering debt burden even higher.
The federal government is already borrowing more than $2 trillion per year, but apparently the socialist answer is to put it on the national credit card and worry about the bill later.
A report from the Taxpayers Protection Alliance estimates that several of the primary policies championed by DSA-backed candidates, including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Troy Jackson in Maine, Angie Nixon in Florida, on top of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would come with extraordinary price tags. It projects that “Medicare for All” would cost more than $32 trillion over ten years; a Green New Deal could cost up to $12.3 trillion over the same period; and a proposed wealth tax would cost more than $2 trillion over the next decade.
In total, the report estimates that these policies would impose at least $5 trillion in new taxes and more than $40 trillion in additional spending by 2036.
Today, the national debt hit $40 trillion. Our new report breaks down the price tag of a radical big-government agenda:
— Taxpayers Protection Alliance (@Protectaxpayers) August 19, 2026
-$32T+ for Medicare for All.
-Up to $12.3T for the Green New Deal.
-$2T+ from a proposed wealth tax.
Taxpayers can’t afford it.
🔗https://t.co/66odHHWiRG pic.twitter.com/0Xrg2FzmgD
“The national debt is a $117,000 tax on every man, woman, and child in the United States. If radical politicians such as Abdul El-Sayed and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) succeed in implementing bank-breaking ideas like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, families will be crushed under the weight of even more debt," TPA Executive Director Ross Marchand said in a statement.
"Free enterprise and limited government have made America the great country that it is, and these proposals would render these institutions obsolete with crushing costs and reams of red tape."
Not only would these policies cost Americans an extraordinary amount of money, they would likely compound the problems already plaguing healthcare, energy, and the broader economy. As government becomes an ever-larger payer, purchaser, and regulator, it increasingly monopolizes the consumer base. The result is predictable. These industries begin catering not to patients, families, and customers, but to the sprawling government bureaucracy that controls their revenue. Innovation slows, choice narrows, costs rise, and accountability disappears.
But do not worry: when those policies fail, the blame will not fall on the government or the politicians who made the promises. It will fall on the free market, the one beneficial institution they spent years smothering.
“Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson want to saddle Americans with massive tax hikes to bankroll their government-run healthcare scheme that would eliminate private insurance and drive the debt even higher,” NRSC National Press Secretary Bernadette Breslin said.
The DSA promises a utopian future, as utopian movements tend to do. What it has not explained is how Americans will pay for it, how quality will be maintained, or how a government that already struggles to deliver basic services will suddenly manage vast new sectors of the economy.
When the problem is price, the answer is never more government. More often, it is getting government out of the way and allowing Americans to do what centralized planning never could: create, improve, and drive costs down.