Cost & Tradeoffs

What this document is

Before costing anything, it’s worth naming the genre. This is a party program in the European sense — a statement of direction ratified by a membership convention — not a legislative package. The text itself says some demands “may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up,” and that the goal is to “draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.”

That sentence governs the whole analysis. It splits the program into two categories that need entirely different critical treatment:

• Scoreable reforms — healthcare, housing, education, labor law, tax. These can be costed against the existing system.
• Regime-change demands — abolishing the Senate, subordinating the judiciary to Congress, public ownership of the largest corporations, abolishing police. These cannot be costed, because they change the accounting framework itself. Their risk is structural, not fiscal.

Also worth noting: the document contains no numbers. Not one cost figure, financing mechanism, sequencing plan, or sunset clause. That’s genre-typical for a program, but it means the trade-offs below are ones the authors have not visibly priced.

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1. The fiscal arithmetic

Rough annualized figures, US context (federal outlays ≈ $7T, federal receipts ≈ $5.2T, GDP ≈ $30T):

On healthcare specifically, the estimates are unusually convergent across ideological lines. The Urban Institute found Medicare for All would add roughly $34 trillion to federal spending over ten years; Mercatus put it at $32.6 trillion or higher, and a range of third-party estimates of the 2016 Sanders plan clustered between $25 trillion and $36 trillion, averaging about $30 trillion. Urban’s figure implies roughly 60 percent of the entire current federal budget. The DSA version is more expensive than what those models priced, because it adds free medical education, new public hospital construction, and comprehensive gender-affirming and reproductive care with no cost-sharing.

Two important caveats in the other direction: these are federal costs, not national costs. Much of the federal increase is a transfer of spending already occurring through premiums and out-of-pocket payments. Whether national health expenditure rises or falls hinges almost entirely on one assumption — provider payment rates. The gap between studies showing a 13 percent increase and a 2 percent decrease in national health spending is largely attributable to different assumptions about hospital payment rates. And Mercatus itself found substantial savings from prescription costs ($846B over ten years) and administration (nearly $1.6T).

Where the revenue doesn’t come from

The program names one primary revenue source: “aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations.”

The most optimistic mainstream estimate is Saez and Zucman’s, and it is not close to sufficient. They estimated Warren’s 2 percent tax above $50M plus a 1 percent billionaire surtax would raise around $3.0 trillion over ten years — approximately 1.0 percent of GDP per year — rising to $3.9 trillion if the billionaire surtax went to 4 percent under Medicare for All.

So: $250–390B/yr in optimistic-case wealth tax revenue against $4–6T/yr in new spending. The wealth tax covers roughly 6–10 percent of the program. Even doubling Saez-Zucman’s estimate leaves 80 percent unfunded.

This matters because the gap has only three exits, and the program discusses none of them:

1. Broad-based consumption and payroll taxes. This is how every actual social democracy funds itself. Denmark and Sweden run 25 percent VATs and flattish payroll taxes; both abolished their wealth taxes. Of the twelve OECD countries with active progressive wealth taxes in 1990, only three still taxed individual wealth by 2020. The Nordic model the program gestures toward is financed by the working class taxing itself, not by expropriating the top.
2. Deficit monetization. Defensible in slack conditions; not obviously defensible at 4–6 percent of GDP permanently.
3. The behavioral response. France saw an estimated 12,000 millionaires leave in 2016 alone before repealing its wealth tax — though Saez and Zucman argue such estimates are overstated and that a US design with a high exit tax and third-party reporting would perform far better. Switzerland’s cantonal wealth taxes have operated for a century with good compliance, so the design question is real, not settled.

The honest framing: the program’s fiscal structure implies a federal state consuming roughly 38–45 percent of GDP, financed substantially by taxes falling on the working class it addresses. That’s a defensible position — it’s approximately France. But it is not the position the document communicates, which is that the rich will pay.

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2. Plank-level trade-offs

Universal rent control + social housing

These two demands work against each other, and the empirical evidence on the first is unusually clean. Diamond, McQuade and Qian’s AER study of San Francisco’s 1994 expansion found that rent control increased renters’ probability of staying at their address by nearly 20 percent, while landlords covered by it reduced rental housing supply by 15 percent, causing a 5.1 percent city-wide rent increase. The supply reduction came through condo conversion, sales to owner-occupants, and redevelopment, and produced $2.9 billion in total losses to renters — with 42 percent of those losses borne by future San Francisco residents.

The unintended consequence structure: universal rent control transfers wealth from future tenants and new arrivals to incumbent tenants, and shrinks the private stock the public sector must then replace. If private supply contracts 15 percent under control, the social housing buildout has to be substantially larger than the one already priced above.

Note the authors’ own proposed fix, which the program doesn’t consider: the welfare losses could be mitigated if insurance against large rent increases were provided as government social insurance rather than as a regulated mandate on landlords. That’s a live alternative that preserves the tenant-protection goal without the supply penalty.

32-hour week at full pay — the largest uncosted item

“Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage.”

This appears in the document as a single clause and is arguably the most expensive demand in it. A 32-hour week at full pay is a ~20 percent increase in hourly labor cost, imposed economy-wide. US employee compensation runs roughly $13–14T/yr. Even applying to a fraction of the workforce, this is a private-sector cost on the order of $1–2T/yr — larger than most of the budget lines above, and borne by firms rather than the Treasury, which means it shows up as prices, employment, or automation rather than as a deficit.

It also collides directly with the Green New Deal and social housing planks, which require more aggregate labor hours to build out grid, transit, and 10 million housing units, not 20 percent fewer.

Federal jobs guarantee

Estimates diverge by an order of magnitude depending on take-up assumptions. Levy Institute economists estimated a net federal spending increase of $260–354 billion in the first five years, while Cato noted that at $15/hr plus 20 percent benefits, total labor cost per worker would be $37,440/yr, against a Levy estimate that up to 16 million people could participate — before materials or administration. At a genuine living wage indexed to a 32-hour week, per-worker cost rises well above $55,000.

The real risk isn’t the headline number, it’s the elasticity. A guaranteed job at a living wage with health benefits sets a wage floor that private employers must beat. Even progressive economist Dean Baker has warned that the upstream wage effects constitute “a story of serious wage-price spiral, unless we introduce other measures.” Advocates respond that the program is countercyclical by design and that any price impact would be a one-time level adjustment rather than continuous inflation. That’s a genuine open empirical question, not a settled one — but it means take-up, and therefore cost, is endogenous to the wage chosen, and the program specifies no wage.

Immigration + universal welfare — the sharpest internal tension

The program demands amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, an end to visa caps and quotas, and legalized migration, alongside universal free healthcare, a jobs guarantee, free college, and social housing.

This is the Friedman problem in its cleanest form: open migration and a comprehensive universal welfare state are difficult to combine, because entitlement cost scales with population while the tax base does not scale proportionally. Every cost figure above becomes a function of an unbounded variable.

Second-order: the labor-market incidence of large low-skill inflows falls most heavily on incumbent low-skill workers — contested between Borjas and Card, but the contested range still runs in the wrong direction for the program’s stated constituency. A jobs guarantee partially insures against this, which is coherent, but it converts an immigration policy into an open-ended fiscal commitment.

Police and prison abolition

The program calls for demilitarizing police, disempowering police unions, redirecting funding, and ending qualified immunity “as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.”

Analytically, this bundles items with very different evidence bases and very different coalition costs:

• Ending qualified immunity has cross-ideological support (Cato has campaigned on it for years) and clear accountability logic.
• Civilian oversight with real authority is a mainstream reform with mixed but non-catastrophic evidence.
• Full abolition has no evidentiary base at scale. The best-identified literature (Chalfin and McCrary on police-size elasticities) finds meaningful crime effects from police staffing, and the incidence of violent crime is concentrated in exactly the low-income and minority neighborhoods the program elsewhere prioritizes.

The unintended consequence is coalitional as much as substantive: bundling a high-consensus reform with a low-consensus one raises the political price of the former to the level of the latter. It also sits awkwardly with the “stop gender violence” plank, which requires an enforcement mechanism the program does not name.

Foreign policy

“Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases.”

The direct fiscal effect is the one savings line in the program: roughly $850–900B/yr, of which perhaps $150–250B is genuinely recoverable in the near term after veteran obligations, which the program also expands.

The risk is second-order and large. Rapid closure of overseas basing produces alliance-credibility collapse, and the standard predicted response is proliferation — Japan, South Korea, Poland, Saudi Arabia are the usual candidates. Second, freedom-of-navigation enforcement underwrites the container shipping that makes consumer goods cheap; its withdrawal raises the cost of living the program is trying to lower. Neither effect is certain, but neither is priced.

The demand to “end economic warfare against countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran” also creates a normative tension the document doesn’t address: those three governments imprison independent labor organizers, which is difficult to reconcile with a program whose organizing principle is worker self-governance. Proponents would answer that sanctions harm populations rather than regimes — an empirically supported claim — but the plank is framed around the governments’ independence rather than the populations’ welfare.

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3. The constitutional section is the highest-risk and least-examined part

“Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Plus: “Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.”

This is where I’d concentrate critical attention, because the risks are structural and largely one-way.

The majoritarian trap. A judiciary subordinate to the legislature cannot protect a minority against a legislative majority — that is definitionally what subordination means. But nearly every other demand in the program is a counter-majoritarian right: abortion access, gender-affirming care, tenants’ right to counsel, tribal sovereignty, voting rights for the incarcerated, protection of immigrants. These are precisely the claims that lose in legislatures and win in courts. The program proposes to demolish the institution that enforces the rest of the program.

The design is only safe under the assumption that the left permanently controls the unicameral chamber. Under proportional representation, that assumption is unusually weak — PR systems produce coalition governments, and Europe’s recent trajectory suggests a nationalist right is at least as likely a beneficiary of a subordinated judiciary as the left. Hungary after 2011 is the relevant case study, and it was accomplished with a legislative supermajority operating on exactly this design principle.

The Article V problem. Abolishing the Senate is not amendable through ordinary process. Article V’s entrenchment clause provides that no state may be deprived of equal Senate suffrage without its consent — the only permanently entrenched provision in the document. So the plank has no legal route, only an extraconstitutional one. To the program’s credit, it says this openly (“draft a new constitution”). But that concession deserves foregrounding: the democratic-reform section requires suspending the existing constitutional order, which is a very different risk profile than the healthcare section.

Convention risk. Constitutional conventions are treated in the text as a controllable instrument. There is no precedent, no agreed rules of procedure, and no mechanism to prevent a convention from producing outcomes opposite to the convener’s intent. This is a tail risk with unbounded downside that the program does not appear to have modeled.

“Get rid of lobbyists” also collides with the First Amendment’s petition clause, and would apply symmetrically to labor unions, tenant organizations, and DSA itself.

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4. Internal contradictions worth flagging

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5. Where the critique is weakest

Intellectual honesty requires noting the following, because a critique that ignores them is doing motivated reasoning:

The baseline isn’t free. Most cost analyses implicitly compare the program to a costless status quo. The US spends 17–18 percent of GDP on healthcare versus 11–12 percent for peer countries with universal coverage, with worse aggregate outcomes. National health expenditure under current law is projected at roughly $52 trillion over a decade — the relevant question is not whether $34T is large but whether it substitutes for spending already occurring. Medical bankruptcy, housing cost burden, and stagnant real wages for the bottom half are real costs of the current arrangement.

Rent control evidence is design-specific. DMQ studied tenancy-based control with vacancy decontrol in the most supply-constrained market in America. It also found large benefits to covered tenants averaging $2,300 to $6,600 per person per year. It is a distributional finding, not a pure deadweight-loss finding.

Public ownership of natural monopolies is mainstream, not radical. Municipal water and electric utilities, Norway’s state oil holdings and sovereign wealth fund, and European rail all function. The critique bites against “public ownership of the largest corporations” generally, not against public utilities — a distinction the program’s phrasing blurs in the maximalist direction, but which a serious implementer would draw.

Jobs guarantees have precedents. The WPA and India’s MGNREGA (covering tens of millions of households) demonstrate that large public employment schemes are administrable, whatever their efficiency costs.

Unintended consequences run both ways. Financial deregulation and the shift to defined-contribution retirement had enormous unintended consequences too. “Change carries risk” is not an argument for the status quo unless the status quo’s risks are also counted.

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6. What would make this falsifiable

If you’re evaluating this seriously, the questions that would convert it from a program into an assessable policy are:

1. What is the jobs guarantee wage? (Everything downstream depends on it.)
2. What provider payment rate is assumed for universal healthcare? (This single parameter determines whether national health spending rises or falls.)
3. What is the revenue plan for the 80–90 percent of the program the wealth tax doesn’t cover?
4. Is public ownership compensated or uncompensated, and what happens to pension holdings either way?
5. What protects the program’s rights-claims once judicial review is subordinated to a legislature the left may not control?

The nearest real-world analogue with actual numbers is the UK Labour 2019 manifesto, which was costed at roughly £83B/yr and still produced Labour’s worst result since 1935 — a data point on political risk that’s arguably as relevant as any of the fiscal ones.

DSA Program

Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism.

It might not feel as badly needed as it does now. You enjoy your work; it’s interesting to you, and you’re well trained for it. You work as much as you are able and no more than needed, and you would control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills.

Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore.

You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.

OK, enough about bills. What do you do on your day off? Maybe in the morning, you walk your kids to school, run errands, or go to a doctor’s appointment. In the afternoon, you might play a sport, practice a new skill, read, plan a trip. In the evening, you could meet up with friends or family and eat together, maybe go to the movies or down to the park.

These are all familiar, everyday activities. A socialist day off could be like any good day now. But what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?

What would that be like?

It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But just because it isn’t easy to imagine now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it happen.

Workers deserve more.

OUR PERSPECTIVE

The world is in chaos, but for the bosses, it’s all going according to plan. We can see their plan in the countless heartbreaking images coming out of war zones like Beirut, Gaza, and Tehran. We can hear it in the rumble of bulldozers making way to build detention camps and data centers. We can feel it in the air as the summer heat becomes unbearable, and in the pits of our stomachs when faced with the price of gas and rent. We’re promised magical technology with AI, but in reality, the bosses lay us off and track our every move. The billionaire class is dividing workers against each other, and it’s making us desperate and miserable.

The political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs. As capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism. Big business makes deals with the government to line their pockets, and politicians stoke hatred between working people. Instead of offering real solutions to unemployment and the cost of living, they attack immigrants, communities of color, and trans people. Rather than fixing our broken healthcare system, they push snake oil and circulate conspiracy theories. The Republicans are in on it, the Democratic Party is asleep at the wheel, and both are funded by the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.

Democratic socialists know that no one has to live like this. If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty. We could build a world where no one suffers for their race, gender, or religion, and everyone is free, equal, and cared for. Building this world is the guiding star of our movement. When we labor for our common good instead of private profit, we can all have a secure and dignified life, and use our time and talents how we wish.

To achieve this future, our class must organize. The Democratic Socialists of America is building a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class. Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital; not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society. We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.

DSA has written this program for ending capitalist oligarchy and creating a real democracy. Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up. We push these demands to their furthest extent today, so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future. Join us.

What We Fight For

THRIVING WORKING CLASS COMMUNITIES

FREEDOM TO FLOURISH

Expand public resources to support recreation, learning, and social spaces accessible to all. Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage. Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt.

HEALTHCARE FOR ALL

Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals, including complete access to reproductive and gender-affirming care. Expand healthcare access and quality by investing in new public hospitals and clinics. Make all medical education and training public and free.

HOUSING FOR ALL

Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.

FINISH RECONSTRUCTION

End the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Reinforce anti-discrimination laws. Honor all treaties and tribal sovereignty. Enact reparations and massively invest in good jobs, quality housing and infrastructure in neglected minority communities.

END MASS INCARCERATION AND POLICE IMMUNITY

Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor. Treat drug addiction and mental illness as health issues, not crimes. End qualified immunity and empower civilian oversight bodies with real authority over the police.

FEMINISM FOR ALL

Socialist feminism fights for queer liberation and the freedoms of all working class women. Stop gender violence and end policies that oppress bodily autonomy and intimate life, including patriarchal restrictions on abortion, childbirth and childraising, gender expression and transition, marriage, and divorce. Ban sex discrimination and ensure fair compensation and support for all forms of labor, including care work.

GREEN NEW DEAL

Workers must lead our democratic transition to a green future. Pass a federal jobs guarantee. Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure. Phase out the use of fossil fuels. Reclaim and repair our earth’s resources for all.

WORKING-CLASS FOREIGN POLICY

END THE U.S. WAR MACHINE

Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases. Support and fully employ veterans. End immunity for U.S. war criminals and support the International Criminal Court’s mandate to prosecute war crimes.

FREE PALESTINE

Recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right to resist military occupation, and the right to self determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.

END BLOCKADES, EMBARGOES, AND SANCTIONS

People around the world deserve to live their lives without U.S. interference. End economic warfare against countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

ABOLISH ICE

End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.

WORKING-CLASS DEMOCRACY

DEMOCRACY FOR ALL

Extend full voting rights to all permanent U.S. residents and restore the right to vote for incarcerated people and people with criminal convictions. Establish statehood for Washington D.C. and recognize the right to self-determination for all U.S. territories and colonies. Expand and protect voting rights and end voter suppression.

A REAL DEMOCRACY

For the working class to govern, we need a new political system. End political corruption and legalized bribery: get rid of lobbyists, dark money, and Citizens United, and publicly finance all elections. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS

Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.

DEMOCRACY AT WORK

Empower workers to come together and fight the boss. Protect, expand, and enforce the rights of all workers to form, join, and strike with their unions, regardless of industry. Support union members who organize reform caucuses, democratize their unions, and take political action.

Our program was drafted between the months of April and June 2026 by a committee of DSA members, elected through a process established by DSA’s 2025 National Convention. The program committee included members of DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC), leaders of national committees, and rank and file members, representing the political breadth of our big tent organization. We met most weeks to write, discuss, debate, structure, and edit until we submitted our draft to the NPC to amend, finalize and approve. The website, artwork, print layout, and communications for Workers Deserve More were 100% made and designed by us and other DSA members from all over the country.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to see our collective human labors, born of our comradeship and commitment to our movement and our political home, the Democratic Socialists of America, go out into the world. Solidarity!

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