Center-right group: Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal could cost $93 trillion

A center-right think tank said Monday that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) “Green New Deal” could cost up to $93 trillion.

The analysis from the American Action Forum puts the price tag for the sweeping policy proposal between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10 years.

{mosads}The Green New Deal resolution was introduced in both the House and Senate earlier this month by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

The nonbinding proposal is focused on achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within the next 10 years while also creating millions of “good, high-wage jobs.”

The think tank, run by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, broke up the cost of each major goal in the resolution.

They estimate that eliminating carbon emissions from the power and transportation sectors would cost between $8.3 trillion and $12.3 trillion.

The American Action Forum estimates that the job guarantee in the resolution would cost $6.8 trillion to $44.6 trillion, while the promise for universal health care would cost $36 trillion over the 10-year period.

“The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive,” the group said in its report. “It’s further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”

The resolution’s supporters say that inaction in the face of climate change would be far more costly than their proposals.

Markey criticized the think tank’s findings on Monday, arguing that they included measures that are not in the Green New Deal.

“Any so-called ‘analysis’ of the #GreenNewDeal that includes artificially inflated numbers that rely on lazy assumptions, incl. about policies that aren’t even in the resolution is bogus,” Markey wrote in response to the report on Twitter. “Putting a price on a resolution of principles, not policies, is just Big Oil misinformation.” 

Any so-called “analysis” of the #GreenNewDeal that includes artificially inflated numbers that rely on lazy assumptions, incl. about policies that aren’t even in the resolution is bogus. Putting a price on a resolution of principles, not policies, is just Big Oil misinformation.

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) February 25, 2019

The Massachusetts lawmaker went on to say that the think tank “spends some time doing basic multiplication on the impact of making all air travel unnecessary, a concept mentioned nowhere in the resolution text.”

“Another example, the $5.4 trillion it estimates to transition our electric grid comes seemingly from thin air, as NO SOURCES are documented for their generation cost assumptions,” Markey added.

Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report from The Hill.