Some math to get the point across: The Green New Deal is insane

New Jersey junior senator Cory Booker was, at one time, the mayor of Newark, and so he had considerable incentive to balance a budget. After all, cities generally can't run deficits. His degree from Yale Law was little help in this, and it's possible he deferred this task to bean-counters under his control. But we should assume that on the way to his current exalted position, he completed the seventh grade, with its requirement to do basic arithmetic. Along with presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Fauxcahontas Warren, Booker has signed on to Alexandria Airhead-Cortez's "Green New Deal" legislation. As Lie-awatha Warren says, "It's time to 'go big or go home.'" They all seem to follow the leftist logic that "green" lines up with "good." In keeping with such deep thinking, leftists believe that costs are merely numbers. If the numbers on the price tag are too big, then we just write bigger numbers to match them.

Unfortunately, the Left has great difficulty seeing anything other than "need." A discussion of any confounding factors usually misses a lefty Millennial's eight-second attention span. So we are left with a difficult problem. Discussions of the $7-trillion price tag for the GND carbon-neutral energy schema don't even get heard. We're ignoring the $32.6-trillion price tag of the Medicare for All proposal and all that other "socialist" feel-good insanity. We have to look elsewhere for something that will pop their bubble. Airhead-Cortez has blithely declared that "the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change." Curious. That's what the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. And we know how accurate that organization has been. Dr. Roy Spencer, the keeper of the satellite data on temperature, shows that there has been no net warming in 20 years. But the GND calls for rebuilding every building in the United States over the next ten years to stave off the ClimApocalypse by making them all "energy efficient," whatever that means. Aha! An opening we can drive a Mack truck through! Here's what we know. There are about 327 million people in the U.S. At roughly four people per household, that means that there are about 82 million households. Yes, many are in apartments, but this is irrelevant to our analysis. Please note that we're using only arithmetic that any seventh-grader is supposed to be able to do. And we're ignoring every non-residential building in the country. All those businesses, police stations, and hospitals will just have to wait. Next, we find that there are 10.7 million construction workers and 8.4 million production workers in the housing industry in the U.S. These workers contribute to about 1.25 million housing starts per year. To replace the 82 million homes in ten years, we'd have to tear down and rebuild 8.2 million homes a year. That's 6.56 times as many as we build now. And that means that instead of 19.1 million workers, we'd need 125.3 million. That doesn't include the people needed to tear down all those homes. Or the people to work in the hotels that would house the people who are waiting to have their homes rebuilt. Or... Where are we supposed to find all those people? We can't print people like money! The total U.S. labor force is about 161 million, with 154 million actually working. (This assumes that the 2.8 million federal employees actually work.) If we devote 125 million workers to construction, that leaves about 26 million people in the private labor force to run our power grid (I forgot! There won't be one.), fly our airliners (Oops, those will be eliminated.), do the work involved in universal single-payer health care, grow our food, run our grocery stores, and so on. Booker and his airhead friends haven't bothered to look at even this simple exercise in arithmetic. They've been happy to let the conversation revolve around exotic discussions of cost analysis. Perhaps we should change our conversation from numbers of dollars to the number of workers needed for the Green New Deal. To get all these people, we'd have to stop aborting 1.3 million babies a year. In a hundred years, we'd have enough people to do the job. Opening the borders might double or triple that, allowing us to have enough people in maybe thirty years. Is that why the Left wants so many unskilled people to cross the border? Hmmmm. But who would feed them, house them, take care of their medical needs, and so on? But that's twenty years after the drop-dead date for the world. Could it be that our best option is to just to buy the Dems a miniature golf course so they can tilt at its windmill? It wouldn't cost nearly as much.