White House Council Scores DSA Agenda at $49 Trillion Over Ten Years

The White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report Thursday scoring the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform at a net fiscal cost of $48.9 trillion over ten years, or about $355,000 per American household.

The report, “The Real Cost of Socialism in America,” is dated October 2026 and posted at whitehouse.gov. CEA Chair Christopher Phelan’s staff examined eight planks of the DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” platform, released in July. Seven of them were scored against the federal budget for 2027 through 2036, in constant 2026 dollars.

Medicare for All accounts for almost the entire total. CEA put its ten-year cost at $47.41 trillion, assuming no premiums paid by users. The New York Post reported a related figure of $49.4 trillion before offsets. The CEA said that gross cost would be partly offset by $2.8 trillion in administrative savings and $4.3 trillion in federal Medicaid savings.

Canceling all student debt and making undergraduate tuition free was scored at $3.60 trillion, the upper bound of the chapter’s range. A 32-hour workweek mandate was scored at $918 billion. Open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens were scored at $530 billion, the midpoint of a $440 billion to $613 billion range. Green New Deal policies were scored at $370 billion. A universal 1.5 percent cap on rent increases was scored at $16.2 billion.

A 5 percent annual wealth tax on fortunes above $1 billion was treated as revenue of $3.94 trillion over ten years, using the sponsors’ estimate before a projected $449 billion drop in income-tax receipts from lower wages. Subtracting that revenue from the spending leaves the net burden of $48.90 trillion. The gross cost, before the wealth tax, is $52.84 trillion.

The public-safety chapter was not given a budget score. It covers abolishing police, including ICE, reclassifying offenses as misdemeanors, eliminating cash bail, and shortening sentences. CEA said the empirical literature finds each of those policies raised crime where they were tried.

If the net cost is financed by borrowing, CEA estimates the 10-year Treasury yield would rise 5.8 percentage points and likely breach 10 percent, with 30-year mortgage rates above 12 percent. The estimate uses an average from Rachel and Summers (2019) of 38 basis points of interest-rate increase per percentage point of deficit-to-GDP. Adding $49 trillion would lift debt held by the public from the Congressional Budget Office’s projected 120 percent of GDP in 2036 to 254 percent. Annual debt service would be more than $6 trillion larger in year ten, and total interest payments would exceed CBO’s projected revenue in 2036.

On inflation, CEA used two academic estimates as bounds. Each year of $4.9 trillion in extra deficit spending would add 12.7 to 15.6 percentage points to the long-run price level. Over ten years, cumulative excess inflation would be about 130 to 160 percentage points.

If the same cost is financed by taxes instead of debt, CEA estimates real annual GDP would fall 14.6 percent in perpetuity, driven by less capital and a 16.2 percent drop in total labor hours. A related figure in the summary puts lost output at about 19.2 percent a year, or roughly $72.5 trillion over a decade. After-tax hourly wages for the average household would shrink 28.4 percent, about $22,000 a year in 2026 dollars, against a Census baseline of $76,060 in real post-tax household income.

To raise an extra $4.9 trillion a year while keeping the current mix of individual and corporate taxes, CEA calculates the economy-wide effective individual income-tax rate would rise from about 14.1 percent of adjusted gross income to about 39.6 percent. The effective corporate rate would rise from about 11.1 percent to about 30 percent.

On the wealth tax alone, CEA wrote that real wages would fall 2.5 percent, about $1,700 a year for the median full-time worker. It estimated 1.1 million more people unemployed, real GDP 2.4 percent lower by year ten ($8.6 trillion over ten years), the price level 2.8 percent higher, stock-market capitalization down $3.8 trillion, and about $2,100 off the median 401(k).

Using a fifty-state panel, CEA associated 1,000 additional crimes per 100,000 people per year — a 28.2 percent increase in the crime rate — with a 110-day drop in average life expectancy, or 2.5 years if the added crime is violent. The same increase was associated with 173 more deaths per 100,000 when the crime is violent, 730 more children in poverty per 100,000 children ages 5 to 17, and 1,430 to 1,640 fewer children who out-earn their parents per 100,000 children.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said the Democrats’ “embrace of communism and socialism” would have families “pay trillions to fund these out-of-touch ideas,” and that President Trump would “always choos[e] capitalism and freedom over communism and decline.” The DSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the New York Post.

The report does not score every DSA proposal. Defunding the Department of War and abolishing the Senate are among the items left out of the fiscal total. The figures are CEA estimates of a platform, not enacted law.