Thread by @originalspin

It’s the Green New Deal, not the New Green Deal, though.

The sustainability part is *meant* to be a framing device and rationale for the social programs. Maybe it’s overambitious and fuzzy or impractical in some areas, but isn’t that how major legislative campaigns always begin?

https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1093913715999678464

Regarding paying for the #GreenNewDeal: Tax carbon. Tax the rich. Take an equity bite out of startups that the program invests in. There‘ll need to be rightsizing, but it’s not more improbable to make work than was the first New Deal, which cost about 1% of our GDP over 8 years.

The cost for the combined programs has been pegged at $40 trillion. But $32 trillion of that is Medicare For All, which if we carve off, leaves $8 trillion for the core GND (including job guarantees, student loan forgiveness, free college, paid leave & Social Security expansion).

$8 trillion would mean adding a little over 30% to our national debt. That’s what the original New Deal did—and what the Recovery Act of 2009 did, per the St. Louis Fed.
stlouisfed.org/publications/r…

But even this cost has to be put in context, because *doing nothing* is not free. US losses from climate change increase are estimated to rise to *$2 trillion a year* by end of century, and that’s only monetary; the costs in life, suffering and natural resources are incalculable.

My take is Medicare For All should be considered an entirely separate goal and program while the rest of the GND is framed as a major jobs/economy/stimulus/sustainability act. If so, it’s comparable in cost to prior measures like the New Deal and Recovery Act. We can get it done.

(We should get Medicare For All done too, but it has its own separate case to make.

Blending it with the GND would’ve been like anchoring Obamacare to the Recovery Act, making both measures impossibly harder to achieve.)