If I Had a Trillion and a Half Dollars
The House and Senate GOP tax plans both run up a deficit of $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. With credit due to the Barenaked Ladies, here are some other things that congressional Republicans could have chosen to do while adding a trillion and a half dollars to the national debt:
— Rid the world of malaria, a disease that afflicts more than 200 million people and kills more than 400,000 per year (price tag: $90 billion to $120 billion);
— Build a world-class nationwide high-speed rail network across the United States (price tag: in the range of $250 billion);
— Implement all cost-beneficial investments in U.S. highway infrastructure (price tag: probably somewhere in the $800 billion to $900 billion range, according to the Federal Highway Administration);
— Make pre-K universal in the United States (price tag: about $26 billion a year, or $260 billion over a decade);
— Make public college tuition-free for every student in the United States (price tag: likely in the range of $75 billion per year, or $750 billion over a decade);
— Employ 1 million additional police officers, which would more than double the current force, and add 2 million additional teachers, or one for every 25 schoolchildren (price tag: 3 million x ~$50,000 x 10 years = $1.5 trillion);
— Come pretty darn close to ending poverty in the United States (the poverty gap — i.e., the amount that it would take to bring all Americans who are in poverty up to the federal poverty threshold — was $169 billion in 2016; $169 billion x 10 = $1.69 trillion).
Instead, House and Senate Republicans have chosen to allocate about a trillion and a half dollars toward reducing the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 20%. (Aside from that, the other provisions in the GOP tax plans more or less cancel each other out revenue-wise.)
[Addendum: I should add that not all of these are things I think the government should do. We can debate what the best uses of $1.5 trillion are. The point, though, is that $1.5 trillion is a heck of a lot of money — close to $5,000 per American. You should be able to do a lot of good with $1.5 trillion. It’s remarkable that the Republicans have found a way to spend $1.5 trillion that doesn’t accomplish that.]
