There is a specific moment in every argument about public goods when the extractor gets nervous and reaches for the calculator. In a Fox News op-ed titled “Democratic socialists have lots of ideas, but how are we supposed to pay for them?”, certified financial planner Ted Jenkin demands the math behind progressive proposals — childcare, transit, healthcare, paid leave. He warns about the $40 trillion national debt, insists that every promise has a price tag, and asks us to show the numbers.
He is entirely right about the price tag. He is entirely wrong about who is already paying it.
The math matters. The national debt is a genuine burden, and we cannot fund new programs by pretending interest payments don’t compound. But Jenkin’s “how do we pay for it?” only works if you stop the clock before the private bill arrives. He treats the current, extractive market system as a zero-cost baseline — as if the status quo is free and any public alternative is a new expenditure. The household analogy does the work. A family can’t print money, can’t borrow from itself, can’t run counter-cyclical fiscal policy. A family has to balance its checkbook or it goes broke. That’s true. The country is not a family. Importing the household budget into the federal budget is the move, not the conclusion. Import it once and you never have to defend the import.
Every other rich country already pays for the things Jenkin says America can’t afford. We pay for them too — badly, through private channels that don’t deliver the thing.
Look at childcare. The market rate in most American cities runs between $15,000 and $30,000 per child per year. Most families can’t afford it; most childcare workers can’t live on it; nobody’s getting rich. The arithmetic doesn’t close. Jenkin asks how we fund government-supported care. We are already funding it — by forcing a parent, usually the mother, out of the workforce, by paying the childcare worker poverty wages so low she relies on Medicaid and food stamps, by the productivity loss to employers whose employees can’t find care. The taxpayer is already paying for childcare; we’re just paying it in the most expensive, inefficient way possible, by subsidizing the worker’s poverty instead of funding the care itself.
Look at healthcare. The average premium for a family employer-sponsored plan in 2024 was about $25,000, with the worker paying roughly $6,000 of that. The United States already spends more per person than any other nation — roughly twice what the average rich country spends, with worse outcomes in life expectancy, maternal mortality, and infant mortality. We are not avoiding the bill for universal care; we are paying a premium to route it through a tollbooth operator. The “cost” of a public option isn’t new money. It’s the money we are already handing to the insurance adjuster, the billing department, and the private equity firm that bought the local hospital and loaded it with debt.
Look at housing and transit. We pay for them in car payments at double-digit interest for anyone without prime credit, because we couldn’t afford to build a train. We pay for them in rent to a landlord who borrowed against the building to buy it in the first place. We pay for tuition through the largest student debt bubble in history — $1.7 trillion — plus the federal subsidies that flow to lenders and servicers, plus the delayed homeownership, marriage, and childbearing that economists can actually measure. We are not over-taxed. America has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio of any rich country: roughly 26%, versus Denmark’s 45%, Sweden’s 41%, Norway’s 40%. We are unusually under-taxed by rich-country standards, and we get the world’s most expensive healthcare and the world’s worst paid family leave and the world’s highest student debt for the privilege.
The question is never “can we afford it?” The question is “who do we want to pay?” Do we want to pay the middleman — the extractor who stands between you and the thing you need, taking a cut for the privilege of existing? Or do we want to pool our resources and pay for the thing directly?
This is what the Nordic model actually is. It is not a utopia where things are free. It is a society that looked at the extractive tollbooth and decided to buy it out. They pay higher taxes, yes, but they don’t pay the car note, the surprise medical bill, or the tuition. Their per-capita healthcare spending is a fraction of our bill. They traded the tollbooth for a flat fee, and they welded the trap doors shut so that a layoff doesn’t end on the street.
Jenkin’s piece also offers the bedrock claim: America became the most prosperous nation in history because we rewarded people who created value. Entrepreneurs, small business, hard work, personal responsibility. The wealth was real. It was also built on a foundation the bedrock claim doesn’t mention — the public land-grant universities, the interstate highway system, the publicly funded research that became the internet and the polio vaccine and the smartphone in your pocket, the GI Bill, the rural electrification program, the labor of every generation of workers whose education was partly publicly funded, whose children went to public schools. The American prosperity story is a public-investment story dressed up as a private-enterprise story. The bedrock claim works because it suppresses the public infrastructure underneath.
So let me end on what’s built, not on the wreckage. The expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021 cut child poverty by 46% in a single year, from 9.7% to 5.2%, lifting about 2.9 million children out of poverty. It cost roughly $120 billion for one year. The poverty came back when the credit lapsed. We ran the experiment on ourselves and got the answer. Alaska’s Permanent Fund has mailed every Alaskan an annual dividend from oil revenue since 1982. Norway’s fund, built on the same principle but bigger, is now worth more than $2 trillion and owns about 1.5% of every publicly listed company on earth. Texas struck oil too. Texas built a boom, a bust, and a bumper sticker. The Bank of North Dakota has been profitable every year since 1919. Nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. Ace Hardware, Land O’Lakes, Ocean Spray, REI, the credit union in your wallet, the rural electric cooperative that wires your aunt’s farmhouse — these are cooperatives, member-owned, profitable, and American. We run a public bank in the reddest state in the union. We insure our grandparents through Medicare. We didn’t ask “how do we pay for it?” and then stop. We asked it, found the math, and built the thing.
Ted Jenkin wants you to believe that the only choice is between a balanced budget and a bankrupt society. The reality is that the society is already bankrupt; it’s just being bled by a thousand private cuts instead of one public bill. When you stop paying the middleman, you aren’t spending new money. You’re just finally getting what you paid for.