Freshman Bronx congresswoman and self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently announced her plan to enact a program to decarbonize the United States economy. Dubbed the Green New Deal, the radical plan would ban the use of all fossil fuels from the American manufacturing, agriculture, and electricity sectors by 2030.
Ocasio-Cortez has described the plan as a way to address climate change, however there’s more to the Green New Deal than its proposed energy provisions.
The Green New Deal includes a number of radical programs that have nothing to do with “green” energy, and everything to do with increasing the power and scope of the federal government. Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal calls for creating a federal jobs guarantee that would “assure a living wage job to every person who wants one,” and would form “basic income programs” with newly-imposed workplace requirements and wage standards. The proposal also includes single-payer health care and provisions to “mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth.”
Supporters of the plan have kept quiet about these hidden — and more costly — details, advertising its energy mandates alone. But while Ocasio-Cortez insists the purpose of the proposal is to reduce the global temperature and prevent a rising climate in the future, her real intentions are clear: the ultimate goal of the Green New Deal is to enact a series of radical redistributionist programs and impose socialism on the American people.
And how would these socialist programs be funded? Just like the Democrat-proposed Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, too, has an enormous price tag. Economists estimate that a guaranteed minimum income (just one part of the plan) of $12,000 a year would cost $3.8 trillion alone. Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a 70% tax rate on the rich, saying the wealthy should pay their “fair share.” Democrats have also introduced a national carbon tax in Congress to fund their socialist plan. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a $25 per ton carbon tax would be approximately a $1.1 trillion per year increase in taxes. If enacted, it’s clear the Green New Deal would cause mass inefficiencies in our economy, lead to soaring federal spending, doubled taxes, and a rising national debt.
If this weren’t enough, the Green New Deal would destroy individual liberty as we know it, allowing the government to meddle in every aspect of each American’s personal life. When you centralize control of the economy and the people who work in it, you destroy individual freedom and autonomy. Just look at North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Simply put, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is about socialism and government expansion, not the environment. Younger voters may be fooled by the congresswomen’s idealism and lofty promises, but those of us who have witnessed the collapse of other countries after adopting similar socialist plans already know that the Green New Deal is nothing but a raw deal for Americans.