The Democratic Socialists of America are pushing for a federal government spending spree that could top $200 trillion over the next decade.
Page F5From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
Report warns socialism could cost $200 trillion while DOJ settles with TikTok for a mere $400 million.
As it ran on the front
Two numbers came across the wire this week and I want to set them next to each other, because that's what the ledger is for.
Number one: a report finds democratic socialism could cost the United States two hundred trillion dollars, described elsewhere in the same coverage as closer to Soviet-style communism. That's the number driving the week's fiscal alarm. Two hundred trillion. I've written it out in words so we're both sure we're looking at the same figure.…
…(cont) Number two: the Department of Justice settled with TikTok for four hundred million dollars, a number described by people inside Washington, in the same news cycle, as a sweetheart deal — their word, sweetheart — and one that has insiders asking, on the record, how the department arrived at that figure at all. Nobody inside the building can explain the four hundred million. Nobody outside the building can explain the two hundred trillion either, but only one of those numbers is getting asked about out loud.
Set them side by side and the gap is two hundred trillion to four hundred million — that's roughly five hundred thousand to one. One number is a projection nobody can check, used to describe what might happen if a policy direction were adopted. The other is an actual settlement, already signed, that moved actual federal enforcement dollars, and the people closest to it can't reconcile how the number was reached.
I'm not going to tell you which number should worry you more. I'm only going to observe that the unverifiable one got the headline framing of national emergency, and the verifiable one, the one with an actual signature on it, got a shrug and a question mark from the people who work down the hall from where it was signed. That's the entry I'd flag if this crossed my desk for reconciliation: the size of the alarm doesn't match the size of the receipt, and the receipt we can actually confirm is the smaller number, and it's the one nobody in the building can account for.
The rest is just which figure the cameras were pointed at, hon, and which one they weren't.
“They'll scream trillion-dollar doom about programs that keep grandma's lights on, then quietly wave through a nine-figure settlement nobody in the building can explain. The fear is for you; the fine print is for them.”
“The two hundred trillion figure reflects long-term modeling across multiple decades, it's not like we're saying that happens tomorrow — and the TikTok number, that was negotiated fairly, presumably, I didn't see the memo.”
The receipts
The Justice Department’s $400 million deal to settle TikTok child privacy allegations has puzzled Beltway insiders over its easy terms and an unusual lack of transparency around the resolution to the blockbuster case, The Post has learned…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.