With over 30,000 documented lies just in his Presidency and the Big Lie central to Trump’s political power, there is one that truly stands out. A single $100,000,000,000,000 ($1T) lie — a lie that isn’t just Trump’s but permeates the Republican Party and the extremist right wing sound machine (RWSM).
Trump’s Biggest Lie (that $100T lie) has shown up all over the place, including in the Presidential debates last fall.
[VP Biden]’s talking about the Green New Deal. And it’s not 2 billion or 20 billion as you said, it’s $100 trillion.
Upfront (for a truth sandwich), a taste of Trump’s massive deceit in just a few words.
- The Biden-Harris Build Back Better is about $2T (not $100T) …
- climate action is only a portion of this.
- The Biden-Harris program is not what was proposed in The Green New Deal legislation.
- These are not the same things even if there are spaces of overlap.
- The Green New Deal proposals have far more than direct climate action but address social equity and resiliency (health care for all, job guarantees, and otherwise). Climate action is only a fraction of proposed Green New Deal investments.
- And, the total Green New Deal investment requirement over 30 years would fall below $100T and, as per below, have outsized benefits. These expenditures would be investments with returns for the nation.
- For real understanding, analysis requires costs in total isolation to other issues:
- What would costs be without the proposed investments?
- What would benefits be beyond ‘business as usual’?
- In other words, not just discussing and assessing “cost” but cost/benefit, investment/return analysis that might provide a picture for net costs or, more accurately, net benefits.
Okay, that’s a thick slide of bread for a truth sandwich.
Now, as with so much of Trump’s deceit, there is an open debate: ‘Is it a lie if he doesn’t know it isn’t the truth?’ There is much behind Trump’s Biggest Lie, including extensive Fox commentary promoting it. And, there is (sort of) research behind the lie — skewed, inaccurate, costs-only, deceptive reporting that has a ‘name’ behind it.
With The Green New Deal being deployed, conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, formerly the head of the Congressional Budget Office, did a cursory analysis of “costs” for the Green New Deal that totaled $93T … that is $93T using solely the high-range cost estimates and so cursory that DHE’s warned that these “best thought of as estimating the order of magnitude” (e.g., a $5T “estimated cost” was best thought of as from $1-$9.9T). This is a very troubled effort since it didn’t deal with avoided costs and BAU outlays nor any look at resulting benefits from the expenditures. A truthful, fully-burdened assessment would have been discussing net benefits, in fact, rather than $93T in costs.
For example, “universal health care” is assessed at $260,000 of estimated cost per household over ten years or $26,000 per household. Wow. That is a big number. But, well, hold it a second for some context. U.S. medical costs were $11,582 per person in 2019 or about $46,000 per household of four. In essence, DHE’s analysis is thus asserting that the GND would lower average household costs by about $20,000 per year (without accounting for inflation, other ‘costs’ (time filling out paperwork, less business creation due to health insurance issues, better medical care, etc …). Hmm, does context provide a different feel for the situation
So, the basic analytical approach was essentially a back of the envelope penciling of only part of the overall financial (and other) implications and skews discussion by being without context.
This skewed and distorted analysis has been the basis for OPED after political comment after fossil foolish pontificator attack on moves to Act On Climate. That (not really) $93T (okay, Trump rounded up to $100T … one of his lesser exaggerations in his life) represents far more than the investment required for climate mitigation and adaptation called for in The Green New Deal and far more than the Biden-Harris Build Back Better plan.
Look at the DHE table. Well over $80T of the $93T is for guaranteed jobs, universal health care, and food security. As Trump attacks Biden re GND related to climate action, Trump is exaggerating the already misleading analysis by an order of magnitude.
However, consider the remaining climate-related elements of DHE’s table. All of these items represent investments that displace other costs that would occur (such as installing solar and wind with resources that would have built coal plants and mined coal) and that will deliver valuable services (electrons!) while doing so with lower costs (lower cost electricity, lowered pollution impacting health and environment).
In many ways, the RWSM’s screaming about the $93T Green New Deal is truly a classic case of The Big Lie. A pseudo-analytically based figure that has a plausibility ring to it that is complicated enough to understand and explain that most will hear and remember $93 trillion without realizing it was all one Big Lie.
And, when it comes to Trump’s unending whoppers, false assertions of Biden’s climate plan being “$100 trillion” is Trump’s Biggest Lie.