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When self-described socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., released her “Green New Deal” Thursday, it was a full-blown leftist buffet.

“The new Green Deal isn’t a plan. It’s a socialist Christmas list,” explained the Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein. “The Green New Deal, so far as it exists in the form of a nonbinding resolution, isn’t merely confined to addressing climate change; it also calls for tackling jobs, food, healthcare, housing, employment, infrastructure, transportation, education, and a whole host of issues.”

As conservatives and others rightly mock the “Green New Deal” for its impracticality, Bloomberg’s Noah Smith came up with a rough cost: about $6.6 trillion annually. “That’s more than three times as much as the federal government collects in tax revenue, and equal to about 34 percent of the U.S.’s entire gross domestic product,” Smith notes.

What’s Ocasio-Cortez’s solution to pay for this? More deficit spending! Print more money!

Many laughed, but this isn’t much different from how the U.S. already pays for perpetual war.

In 2016, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Washington politicians “wasted $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East,” he was addressing the exorbitant cost of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere that just never seem to end.

Just one week before Ocasio-Cortez revealed her green manifesto, a bipartisan majority in the Senate came together to rebuke President Trump for wanting to bring home American troops from Syria and Afghanistan. With the largest national deficit in years in 2018 and a national debt that just hit $22 trillion (the national debt was less than $7 trillion when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003), apparently most senators believe we can still afford to stay abroad indefinitely.

The Pentagon says the U.S. spends about $45 billion a year to keep American soldiers in Afghanistan and $15.3 billion in Syria. This might not be as high as the spending seen at the heights of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but America’s increasing deficits and debt remind us this is still money we don’t have. These are also wars most Americans no longer want to fight and that the general leading the mission in Afghanistan admits can’t be won militarily.

It’s amusing how math changes along with politicians’ priorities. Republicans who always demand increased Pentagon spending say they can’t find $70 billion for food stamps. Democrats who agree with Republicans that America’s wars should never end say they can’t even find $5 billion for a border wall.

But they can always find money for war.

And virtually every Washington hawk will defend this spending the same way: America’s national security is too important to skimp on.

This is exactly what Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive friends will say about saving the planet from climate change. Or healthcare. Or housing. Or education. Or any of the many other liberal agenda items Democrats would spend billions if not trillions on if they only could. (Not to mention, it’s not exactly clear how the current U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Syria actually enhances national security).

It might sound reasonable to many Americans that their government should be spending on healthcare instead of costly wars in places they can’t find on a map. In fact, don’t be surprised if a number of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders who have already backed the “Green New Deal” make that case.

Ocasio-Cortez already has.

Fiscal conservatives and libertarians make the case that the U.S. can’t really afford endless war or government healthcare because the money doesn’t exist.

Obviously, what Ocasio-Cortez would like to spend on her progressive agenda would significantly dwarf what the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cost. Her annual budget, according to Bloomberg, has roughly the same price tag as 17 years of fighting in the Middle East.

But saying her big government is laughable compared to our current big government is not a good argument for those who imagine themselves to be fiscally responsible.

By all means, continue mocking the “Green New Deal” for all the policy and fiscal lunacy that it is. But don’t pretend that Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas to fund it are that different from how Washington operates every day.

Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’ s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.