The Insane Economic Theory Behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal”

July 17, 2019

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled out her “Green New Deal” earlier this year, she neglected to include a price tag. How many trillions would we need to spend and raise in taxes to fund a government takeover of healthcare, a forced transition to “green” energy, the potential elimination of air travel, and free cash for those unwilling to work? She refused to say.

This was deliberate. AOC’s refusal to say how much her plan would cost was a feature, not a bug, and it turns out it’s based on a laughable economic theory that even Obama-economists are slamming as “a recipe for disaster.”

AOC’s spend ‘whatever I want no matter the cost’ philosophy is based on an insane economic theory that’s taken over the far-left called “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT). As NPR reports, the “once-obscure brand of economics” has recently come into prominence, thanks in large part to a Bernie Sanders economist who has become an “evangelist” for the theory.

What does MMT say? Just print the money and ask questions later.

“A central element of MMT is that governments that control their own currency — like the United States — don’t have to worry about spending more than they collect in taxes,” reports NPR. “They can always create more money.”

If you think this is madness, every mainstream, respectable economist would agree with you.

“There are no real articles in serious academic journals” promoting MMT, says Stan Veuger, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. A survey this year of top economists by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found that not a single one agreed with the central claim of MMT. Not one.

Even Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, is calling the left’s “embrace of” MMT “a recipe for disaster.”

Now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is promoting MMT as the way to fund her grand spending schemes, saying, “I think the first thing that we need to do is kind of break the mistaken idea that taxes pay for 100% of government expenditure.”

It’s no surprise that AOC would embrace a crackpot economic theory to fund her “Green New Deal” – without one, there is no way to justify the trillions it would take to fund her green dream.