There are plenty of moderate erstwhile Republicans like me who have a fondness for Reagan but who are nevertheless enthusiastic about having a government that can actually do stuff. We’re old and no longer libertarian extremists and don’t hate poor people. We’ll happily vote for a Democrat that says sane, responsible things about the economy and doesn’t push culture war.
That was in 2008, before the identitarian, gender, and cancel culture movements took over the party. And Obama was a black man running as a Democrat. Not someone that identitarians could oppose in any event.
That is in fact the real challenge. How to convince progressives that they're better off with a center left candidate who can win than a candidate who pleases all the groups but loses to a MAGA candidate.
You may not be a political strategist, but you are singing the same tune as the ones I read. Sarah longwell says democrats need to be less PROgressive and more AGGressive.
To put this differently: whichever faction of the Democratic tent is able to make the anti-Trump case will be the one that controls the party's agenda. That faction might be centrist "abundance" people, or it might be the far-left DSA types (Bernie and AOC certainly aren't losing the fight.) But the fight, not the policies will determine which we get.
My main objection to "abundance" is not that it's a bad idea. It's a great idea! It's just that it's a wonky policy idea that mostly distracts people from the basic retail politics they need to be doing to win 2026 and 2028.
Reading between the lines of the abundance critiques (which like you I’ve found to be in startlingly bad faith even from people I normally trust) the main reaction seems to be to reject the notion that “everything bagel liberalism” can possibly be a problem, let alone a big one.
I think a large part of that is insecurity: people are highly invested in small portions of the overall social agenda (or in being seen as supporting that part of the agenda), and worried that their particular hobbyhorse is ripe for ejection if the focus shifts from social issues to economic ones. And… they’re probably not wrong? But it does mean that they feel rightly or wrongly that they’re being cast as the enemy in the effort to organize against the orange man.
JM, this is the best synopsis of why I think the EK and DT approach will never work. Can you point to a liberal (ie left) government structure somewhere at sometime that fosters abundance—sure. Will you able to convert our current American structures to this form—I doubt it. Every change to prioritize “getting things done” rips through someone’s or some group’s reason for existing. And Democratic politics is just not set up to easily allow those types of changes. Hence inertia.
I think it needs to happen in a blue or purple state first, somewhere like PA or WI. (NC or KY would be even better, but GOP intransigence would wreck the project rather than allow a Democratic governor to chalk up any successes) They need to show both the rewards of success and a roadmap for lining up the pieces to make it happen.
Is New Jersey a possibility? It's mostly blue but we do elect Republican governors fairly often. ("Governor Yells-At-People" Chris Christie started out as an early Trump supporter but by 2023 had soured on him to the point where he campaigned in the Republican presidential primary on a "Trump bad" platform.)
I think people are just worried that "don't worry, we promise that a decade from now we'll make you all rich and happy" isn't going to actually going to hold together a coalition the way policy wonks think it should. (Note: being skeptical about the politics does not mean it's bad policy.)
That might be, but if so I wish they’d come out and say that, and have the conversation on those terms. Instead I keep seeing all these bad faith takes that greatly misrepresent what the book proposes.
I mean, all I see right now on blogs like this is a bunch of people trying to make “abundance” into a winning political strategy for near-term elections. And as I said in another comment, I don’t think the authors were entirely naive to the notion that this would be a likely outcome of publishing their book at this particular political moment.
So I’m not really going to slag people for correctly responding to that notion (which is certainly the intention of many Twitter and Substack posters, if not the original authors.) If everyone in my neighborhood started demanding that we dress as Gontish wizards, I wouldn’t necessarily blame Ursula K. Leguin for writing “A Wizard of Earthsea” but I’d also probably push back against the wizard costume idea.
So i started Abundance since I last posted here. As someone who leans a teeny bit right (especially fiscally) i wonder what is the evidence that "...The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can."
That is, is there evidence that government is good at determining best investments. It seems to me that gov is simply another self interested institution.
They're talking about environmental externalities. But I'd add another aspect here: military preparedness. Ukraine just took out Russia's bombers with a bunch of battery-powered drones. America can't make many batteries.
And military preparedness has been an explicit goal that reaped significant benefits in the past: the National highway system has been a huge driver of economic development. My grandfather was a truck driver before those highways went in, and the level of knowledge needed just to transport goods was so much higher. After they were built, any old jerk could muddle his way from city to city, and transportation got so much easier and cheaper. That would never have happened even just left to the state governments.
That successful attack used a grand total of 117 drones, which together used less batteries than a single CyberTruck. I fully support the DOD buying drones (even naval ones like the joint Australian navy Anduril undersea Shark drone), but wasting money on consumer EV subsidies isn’t the way to do it.
It’s not that government is automatically the better decision maker. It’s that voters, acting through government, are capable of making value judgments beyond the mere numbers.
You could have 2 policies that have the same mathematical impact on GDP. But government/voters can make a decision based on other factors beyond.
As evidence that the decision making isn’t necessarily better: Both parties are now calling for stronger immigration enforcement. Voters are calling for it.
Yet virtually every economic study will show you that broader immigration, even broader “illegal immigration” is really good for economic growth.
So for good and bad, government and voters can make value judgments beyond the numbers.
The books opening chapter is not representative of the rest of the book . It’s a kind of urban utopia that is not necessarily going to be realized , The rest of the book is a very pragmatic look at how urban progressives have been unable to get good results in projects that provide solutions to homelessness and climate solutions and public transportation. Please read it but skip the laser eyes 😆
While other comments distinguish the claim from your question, if you are interested in evidence of the state's role in innovation, then I know a lot of people speak highly of The Entrepreneurial State. I also believe many of the people pushing for more government industrial policy cite Concrete Economics as a major influence.
Given that a lot of abundance policy debates take place at the local and state level, I’m skeptical how helpful it is to depict a president as the “villain” of the story.
It’s not Trump who’s making NYC’s housing expensive, it’s outer-borough city council members refusing to allow the construction of 5 story apartment buildings in their districts. It’s not Trump who makes subway construction so expensive, it’s mostly the MTA’s parochial practices.
Maybe depicting Trump and MAGA as the villains of anti-abundance makes for a good headline, but I don’t think it holds up to much scrutiny.
They also think of it in terms of red vs. blue states. So launching a political project whose aim is "let's make the blue states build more stuff like the red states" might be a great long-term policy goal, but will probably not be excellent politics for the next few cycles.
On the one hand they admit that Republican run states get things built much better than Democrat run states, but they still want to make Republicans the enemy anyway to avoid even speaking of the brutal intra-party knife fight that it would actually require to eliminate the elements of the Democratic coalition that are the problem here.. That's why they won't win.
Seems like the focus is on winning elections and being able to justify handouts to the usual suspects using “abundance” arguments rather than actually implementing anything approaching abundance-friendly policies.
The local level is where the biggest impacts could be felt- houses, roads, mass transit. The blue state are the laggards and are also where Dem money and Dem votes come from. Start there, if advocates are serious.
I think they know what they have to do, but they are terrified of Trump. Stating a party civil war would probably be a benefit to the Republicans for at least a couple of elections while they are still consolidating moderate voters, and I just don't think they have the balls to take that risk.
I suspect a lot of this is due to the availability of cheap land, not great policy. Go try to build a new house in Florida and get meaningful insurance.
It’s probably harder to get insurance in California.
Another theory I’ve heard is that because Texas and Florida have no income taxes and support their government with high property taxes, which are based on the price of the house there is a greater demand for cheap houses.
Actually the Trumps COULD reasonably be depicted as anti-abundance villains, because they were atypical among NYC's real estate developers in their enthusiasm for downzoning.
Fred Trump (Donald's dad) was the only major NYC developer to support the 1961 Zoning Resolution, while Donald himself supported an (ultimately rejected) plan to downzone much of Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Nobody cares what Fred Trump did. He's dead. Did Donald do any of that? Even if he did, it's just going to be hard to blame the guy who's got skyscrapers with his name on them for the inability to build things, especially in an area where the government who controls what is allowed to be built is run by people who rabidly hate him.
Being the double hater of both parties makes me quite lonely at times. I am mad at our professional politicians as they are failing the country. I do have to laugh sometimes at the absurdity of the calls for more anger. As if there already wasn’t enough anger to motivate people.
The statement that we have overregulated our country is not the beginning of a new progressive movement any more than it is the start of a permanent MAGA movement. I'd like to be quite clear about the movement that will consume the nation in the future.
It will be the debt and deficit movement. The problem with the MAGA Bill is not that it will add close to $4 trillion to our debt. The real problem is the $ 20-plus trillion in annual deficits going forward that will make our debt over $50 trillion.
A looming 23% mandatory cut to Social Security benefits in 2032 should be the clarifying moment for both parties. The Lauffer curve and subsequent results during the Reagan revolution did three things. Increased economic activity resulted in more tax collection. What is also true is that politicians, seeing the increase in tax collection, spent more money.
We continue to spend too much relative to the government's income. Republicans promise tax cuts to win elections, and Democrats promise more government spending to win elections. The result of these promises to their voters is that we have to borrow money to fulfill them.
We are running out of room to borrow forever, and $2 trillion a year in deficit spending will have to stop. It will stop because we soon will not be able to pay the interest and keep the level of spending we currently have without a tax increase. Borrowing costs will become unaffordable.
This is the truth: all the Abundance advocates are doing is rearranging the chairs on the Deck of the Titanic. MAGA BS, Trump BS is whistling past the graveyard, their monstrosity of a bill does nothing to deal with SS or Medicare insolvency or our debt. It is irresponsible, but no less reckless than anything Democrats would come up with. Both parties are destroying the country’s economic security while having cocktail parties over how wonderful they are.
The problem very much *is* the MAGA bill, because it includes major tax cuts that create further structural deficits. If Donald Trump just wanted to build new infrastructure with $4tn of one-off spending, it would be vastly easier for us to deal with in the future. (Yes I'm aware that the new cuts "expire" but so did the 2017 cuts which they're extending. This is just an accounting game.)
We can no longer afford tax cuts. This Congress might pass a new batch, but they'll have to be repealed before they expire, at least if we want to avoid fiscal disaster. And yes, we'll need spending cuts. But the US is a rich country and ultimately we'll be fine.
Trump's interest in deficit-funded tax cuts is literally the only policy he has that's entirely, 100% consistent with traditional GOP policymaking. If he dropped dead tomorrow we'd probably be able to forget about his weird tariff fixation, but the tax cuts would stay front-and-center. Besides, Trump'll be gone in 1329 days, so his ability to destroy our finances is entirely dependent on the GOP continuing to be the GOP.
You're not being properly pessimistic. They could make Trump the Speaker of the House (there's no rule that says the Speaker has to be a Congressman!) and have the President and VP both resign, and say that it doesn't violate the Constitution because he wasn't *elected*...
I actually don't think Trump is going to even try, because I think he's old and tired. Trump is always 100% about projecting strength and intention, no matter how ridiculous it is (think, Greenland and Canada) and even he is visibly not enthusiastic about seven more years of this.
Fixing the debt/deficit problem, or even stabilizing it, is going to be difficult because Americans fundamentally are OK with maxing out their credit cards to maximize current consumption.
Reagan tax cuts DID NOT increase economic activity, any more than any deficit spending would have. There is no supply side fairy. It is discouraging to read people talking about this BS as if it is a fact. It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you think you know that's not true- Mark Twain
Thanks for sharing the source of your misconceptions. Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about the bipartisan, revenue-neutral 1986 tax bill (authored largely by NJ Sen Bill Bradley) but rather the 1981 ERTA, which " Supply-siders argued that the tax cuts would increase tax revenues; however, tax revenues declined relative to a baseline without the cuts because of the tax cuts, and the fiscal deficit ballooned during the Reagan presidency."(wikipedia) That's why Congress raised taxes several times in the 80s.
Cutting taxes for the rich and benefits (health care and food stamps) for the poor as is being proposed is only going to worsen the budget deficit, as CBO and JCT have shown
Tax cuts and spending increases are the problem. Revenue at 17 or 18 percent of GDP and spending at 20 to 22 percent is the problem. I didn’t like the GW Bush tax cuts, and I didn’t think all of the 2017 tax cuts were needed.
I don’t think we should extend those 2017 tax cuts; the American public needs to understand there is a limit to the credit card. Are there targeted tax cuts that I support? Sure. Right now, if we have a severe recession, we’ll only have the Fed, they’ll buy debt and print money....Neither is a good story.
If we should be "mad" about tariffs, we should be near homicidally enraged about the deficit creating tax cuts and jumping up and down furious at the discouragement of skilled and educated foreigners to come to study, work, and live.
One of the problems of "Abundance" was failure to take on these larger obstacles to growth.
The part about foreigners is going to be a tough sell, though. Looking across the world, xenophobia is an easy sell, deliberately allowing more diversity is a hard sell, even if it comes with direct financial rewards.
OK, sure. But the antimonopoly progressives spend a ton of time talking about Mark Zuckerberg and Google. Do we really think that the cost of search ads, or the fact that Meta owns both WhatsApp and Instagram, is what's hurting middle-class Americans right now??
Not those things, but don’t undersell “middle class families are experiencing a lot of angst and drama because they’re fighting on Facebook” and the message that Zuckerberg is directly getting wealthy by monetizing their family strife.
Creating abundance for the middle class will require systemic changes that will disrupt entrenched power brokers. Those who benefit from the system will want to preserve the system.
Agreed. I think the goal is to run against the system that Trump and his billionaire friends are creating that pulls up the bottom rungs of the ladder to the American Dream - upward mobility and prosperity. In other words Trump and his billionaire bros are seeking to make the American Dream scarce a commodity that is only available to people who are loyal and willing to forgo democratic freedom for material wealth. Democrats should focus on the abundance of the American Dream and create vibes around a set of policies that reinstall the bottom rungs of the ladder. Focusing on supply of education, supply of opportunity, supply of housing, and supply of healthcare is much better than simply subsidizing the expense (typical democratic policies) which only increases the costs. Additionally if you are able to expand the supply of these commodities you expand the supply of jobs available which will be critical if the AI disruption to professional jobs occurs as many predict.
When it’s just a few words of rhetoric, say whatever polls best. But if you want a full coherent plan that isn’t just a patchwork of individual popular sentences, you need them to reinforce each other.
If you think the problem is big corporations, then you start trying to break them up regardless of whether they are providing good things for people or not. But if you think the problem is people not having enough housing, energy, innovation, etc, then you figure out on each occasion whether it’s a corporate structure that is choking it off or a government regulation, and you try to fix whatever it is (unless it’s there to provide some greater abundance elsewhere, like the clean water act).
Agreed, a full coherent plan looks more like what is happening in the Defense Industrial Base. The government is focused on the scarcity of the DIB and is trying a full patchwork of policies to address these challenges. I asked Claude to help drafting this, so I haven't checked the details, but this and more is happening to address the scarcity for defense. Abundance policies will always require systemic change because the entrenched power brokers benefit from the status quo.
Based on my research, I can provide you with substantial data and detail to enhance your comment about government efforts to create abundance in the defense industrial base. Here's comprehensive information to strengthen your points:
Defense Production Act Expansion
The Department of Defense has significantly ramped up Defense Production Act Investment (DPAI) funding, with recent awards totaling hundreds of millions: $6.56 million to Montana Technological University for critical workforce development, $20 million to Electra Battery Materials Corporation for cobalt sulfate production, $11.8 million to Lithium Nevada Corporation for lithium carbonate extraction, $23 million to Constellium Muscle Shoals for aluminum production, and $20 million to South32 for manganese production MCEIP - DPAI - Defense Production Act Title III. The DPA is set to expire in September 2025 unless Congress reauthorizes it, with experts calling for modernization to better serve 21st century defense needs Reauthorize the Defense Production Act, but make changes for the 21st century - Breaking Defense.
Office of Strategic Capital Investment Program
The Office of Strategic Capital is now accepting loan applications with up to $984 million available for direct loans ranging from $10 million to $150 million each DOD’s Office of Strategic Capital accepting loan applications as it looks to lend up to $984M | DefenseScoop. OSC received more than 200 applications totaling $8.9 billion in financing requests for its inaugural credit product for American manufacturing Office of Strategic Capital Receives $8.9 Billion in Financing Requests for First Domestic. These loans target 31 covered technology categories including advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, quantum computing, and microelectronics, with eligible companies not required to have any existing DOD contracts DOD Office of Strategic Capital Begins Its Direct Lending Efforts to Secure U.S. Industrial Base | Inside Government Contracts.
A significant executive order was issued in April 2025 specifically targeting defense acquisition reform. The "Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base" executive order directs the Secretary of Defense to eliminate unnecessary regulations, promote expedited acquisitions, apply a "ten-for-one rule" for new regulations, and scrutinize any Major Defense Acquisition Program that is more than 15% behind schedule or over cost for potential cancellation The White HouseThe White House.
Anduril and Palantir Strategic Positioning
Palantir and Anduril are forming a consortium with tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Saronic to jointly bid for Pentagon contracts, explicitly challenging the dominance of traditional defense primes like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing SiliconANGLEReuters. Anduril recently won a $100 million contract from the Chief Digital and AI Office to scale edge data integration services and is heavily involved in the Pentagon's Replicator initiative, while Palantir secured a $480 million Maven Smart System contract and $178 million for the Army's TITAN program Palantir, Anduril form new alliance to merge AI capabilities for defense customers | DefenseScoop.
Defense Primes Under Pressure
Critics argue that the U.S. defense industry has become dominated by a "cartel" of five major contractors (Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon) that control 86% of major program spending, up from just 6% in 1989 Lockheed, Boeing & Northrop Will Be The Reason Why U.S. Could Lose The Next War, Experts Warn; Here’s Why. What was once a field of roughly 75 major aerospace companies in 1980 has consolidated into just five prime contractors by 2001, with the Pentagon now having only three major military aircraft suppliers compared to eight in 1990 What’s Left of the Defense Industry | Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Additional Examples of Fast-Track Measures
Beyond the executive orders you mentioned, other streamlining efforts include:
The FY 2024 NDAA established streamlined requirements development processes to improve alignment with modern technologies and reduce delivery time The FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act: Key Provisions Government Contractors Should Know | Crowell & Moring LLP
Congress set Pentagon R&D spending at $141 billion for FY 2025, with new authorities allowing DOD to initiate new programs under continuing resolutions if they meet certain requirements Congress sets Pentagon research, development, test and evaluation spending at $141B | DefenseScoop
OSC loans are not subject to typical Federal Acquisition Regulations, providing more flexibility than traditional government contracting DOD Office of Strategic Capital Begins Its Direct Lending Efforts to Secure U.S. Industrial Base | Inside Government Contracts
This data demonstrates a comprehensive, multi-pronged approach by the government to reshape the defense industrial base through financial incentives, regulatory reform, and support for emerging competitors to challenge the traditional prime contractor oligopoly.
The point is that we can do both without a problem. We can at the same time renew antitrust while at the same time clearing obstacles to growth. They are not at all mutually contradictory. Neither is the messaging, which was my original point
One more point - antitrust doesnt mean that you break up all large corps simply because they are large. the law permits discretion - you can break up those that are hurting people by being large and leave those that arent for later (or never). There is no "regardless" about it
As a former Federal employee, I am all for government reform and agree with many of the abundance concepts. Promising and not delivering is not a path forward for any political movement. Clearly part of Trump's appeal is doing the things he said he would (or at least look like he is doing something). But this is necessary and not sufficient. Abundance is fundamentally a technocratic solution that avoids hard political questions. Will D's benefit from advocating for more port automation? Will the abundance agenda let the D's leave the culture wars behind? Does the abundance education agenda include testing and advanced high school courses? How do you make this appealing to the non-college educated? The anti-Trump first approach has gotten him elected twice.
"Trump is canceling EV credits and solar subsidies ... it’s going to mean higher electricity bills."
Sometimes you say some really dumb stuff. Subsidizing something doesn't make it cheaper. It makes it more expensive--you're just paying for it through taxes instead.
This isn't a very serious criticism. A huge amount of the IRA subsidies were aimed at building new manufacturing capacity, including new factory capacity, and we got a ton of that [1].
I mean I don’t know. I’d assume that building large amounts of new supply will eventually bring prices down from where they would be otherwise. I believe that because it’s common sense and basic economics.
There are certainly valid criticisms of some of Biden’s policies, but it seems like you aren’t making those here.
Generally speaking, investments take time to make a profit; this is especially true concerning manufacturing, which has steep upfront fixed costs that have to be paid for with years of (profitable) production. Most of those factories were going through the permit-approval/building process when Trump came into power, so it's disingenuous to say that it was all for nothing.
I think that just has more syllables? Idk, but in any case, I'm not sure these movement names matter to the median voter. I think just "You deserve a cheaper house" will work.
Because “affordable housing” literally means price controls in the current world. They took the word already. “Housing abundance” is the term that means that houses come down in price at all points on the spectrum, rather than deciding one price point that is “affordable” and mandating that a few new houses come up at that level, while every other level remains artificially elevated.
I know it means “price controls” for ignorant progressives. I live in a progressive town with skyrocketing prices, yet geniuses here come door to door with the same degrowth and “force greedy developers to sell some apartments for less” solutions. The city is going through an apartment building increase and progressives are freaking out and digging their heels about “greed” yet can’t see they’ve driven all the young out of town with their policies.
Yes- “affordable housing” is about ensuring the government controls which connected developer gets to build the one or two new projects allowed, which offer expensive prices for 90 percent of the new units as they subsidise the below market pricing of the “affordable” units that the friends and relatives of pols and public sector employees might get the first crack at (the developer will have a list of high priority names).
I prefer to think of this as the Star Trek movement. For every kid who watched Star Trek as a kid, and thought a techno utopia sounded like a nice place to live, this is the most direct path there! It doesn’t require giving up any liberal goals, either; everything the progressive movement wants to do becomes easier when the population feels wealthy and happy and secure, and when we invest heavily in human ingenuity.
Because Klein would rather be acknowledged as “smart” and lose than “popular” and win. It’s the built-in mechanism of elite institution members to distinguish themselves as better (language, virtue signaling, etc), and no way can Klein get away from decades of habit.
But this post is explicitly arguing that it should be a political movement as well. And I think a lot of other folks ("on the Internet") have taken it that way as well. Which is, I think, really the source of most of the disagreement you see cited in the body of Noah's post.
Maybe, but that’s not what the authors of the book itself would tell you that they’re trying to do. People who are fired up about the ideas in the book should then take the next step to turn it into a viable movement.
The authors of the book can say anything they want, but everything is political. These are political people. Without a political movement there won't be any "Abundance" agenda, and Ezra Klein is savvy enough to know that. That's why the argument Noah summarizes in his post is even taking place: because folks like Klein and Yglesias and Noah think this is the (political) way forward.
On the other hand, there are people who are skeptical of this as a short-term political agenda. This is being posed somewhat disingenuously as people being pro- and anti-"Abundance", but I think this is a much more narrow argument about what Democrats should be talking about in 2026 and 2028.
Even Noah (who is on the pro-Abundance-as-political strategy side) admits that as a political movement it won't work without some "anger" directed at Trump. I don't disagree. In fact I would simply go farther and say that raising an effective opposition to Trump is 98% of the political strategy the Democrats need to win, and ideas like Abundance are just a thin gloss of political icing on top of that. More concretely, if the person who effectively opposes Trump happens to coincidentally be in favor of "Abundance", we're more likely to get that policy agenda.
PS I will also add that, while I think the policy agenda is pretty good, there are some real risks to the political message. First off, we're not going to have any tangible results by '26 or '28, so I don't see how it helps at all in the near term. Insofar as the message gets interpreted (or twisted) into "all Blue-state Democratic governance sucks, but don't worry we have a long-term plan to make it less terrible" I can certainly see voters responding poorly to that message in '26 and '28.
Trump's problem with trade deficits is easy to understand once you realize that his economic philosophy is straight-up pre-Adam Smith mercantilism: spending money makes a person poorer and getting money makes a person richer, so a country gets poorer when it gives money to other countries and gets richer when other countries give it money. As anyone who has taken an Econ 101 class knows, this is complete garbage when applied to the scale of an entire economy, because, as Adam Smith realized, a nation's wealth lies in its ability to produce goods and services, not in the amount of gold in its treasury.
Noah Smith has described running a trade deficit as you getting stuff and giving out IOUs in return. Trump thinks it's better to be the one holding the IOUs instead of the stuff, but I'd rather be able to have the things that money can buy instead of having the money itself and then not spending it.
I agree an actual abundance agenda would be great. The problem is that any abundance agenda that the Democrats built would have rent-seeking carve outs for every progressive goal.
Union wage guarantees. Check
Carve outs for minority owned businesses. Check.
Subsidies for green energy. Check.
Requirement that all businesses have gay or transgender affirmative action plans. Check.
Guaranteed free health care for illegal immigrants. Check.
Massive payouts to influential NGOs. Check
Extensive reviews (and delays) of the impact of construction on fish and bugs. Check
Again, the Abundance Agenda sounds hunky dory. But the argument is that the party of rent-seeking carve outs and top down dirigiste should seek abundance. The only way they could do this is by shifting to a completely 180 degree different party. You are as likely to get abundance from the Dems as getting Christianity out of a Satantic cult.
And, no I am not arguing the Republicans are better.
"But my instinct is to say that the abundance liberals need to get mad. And they need to get mad not at progressive NIMBYs and pressure groups, but at Donald Trump and the MAGA movement."
Noah, my brother, I am incandescently angry at Trump and his enablers, and have been angry at him for pretty much the past nine years (with an elevation to *nuclear level* on Jan 6, 2021). Where did that get me? If being Very Angry at Trump worked to get rid of him, wouldn't it have done so already?
Do we really have a shortage of political anger and zero-sum thinking in the United States in the Year of Our Lord 2025?
Anyway, I object to this kind of thing on principle. I love the classic Good vs. Evil stories: Star Wars, Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter. But I recognize them as *stories* I enjoy. In real life, sure, there are good and evil people, but most conflict isn't because the leader you hate is evil (unless you're in Putin's Russia); it's because both sides have a legitimate conflict of interest, there are limited resources, collective action problems, etc.
Consider housing. If I'm a renter, or if I have young adult children who want to buy a house, I want housing to be cheap. But if I own a house, and it is my single biggest investment that I count on to help me live comfortably in retirement, I want my house to appreciate in value, i.e., I want expensive housing. Both points of view are understandable and non-evil! But put them together and voila! Conflict.
Mature people understand that's what most conflict is like, instead of looking for villains everywhere.
2/3 of household own their home, while 1/3 rent. Rising home prices benefited the vast majority of households. There are numerous policies at the local, state, and federal level that have encouraged ownership of single family house and obligatory car-dependency ever since the 1950s. That's why the "American Dream" is to own a home and a car in the burbs- it means your in a position to benefit from all the implicit subsidies of that lifestyle. If you're renting and riding public transportation, you're the one paying for the subsidies of the dreamers.
There are plenty of moderate erstwhile Republicans like me who have a fondness for Reagan but who are nevertheless enthusiastic about having a government that can actually do stuff. We’re old and no longer libertarian extremists and don’t hate poor people. We’ll happily vote for a Democrat that says sane, responsible things about the economy and doesn’t push culture war.
"We’ll happily vote for a Democrat that says sane, responsible things about the economy and doesn’t push culture war."
I don't think a Democrat can get through the primary process without pushing culture war race and gender BS, at least not for national office.
Obama did it without pushing culture war issues.
That was in 2008, before the identitarian, gender, and cancel culture movements took over the party. And Obama was a black man running as a Democrat. Not someone that identitarians could oppose in any event.
Kamala
Harris barely mentioned race or gender in her campaign, and just dodged the transgended stuff.
I must have missed the primary contest she won while "barely mentioning race or gender" ...
That is in fact the real challenge. How to convince progressives that they're better off with a center left candidate who can win than a candidate who pleases all the groups but loses to a MAGA candidate.
You may not be a political strategist, but you are singing the same tune as the ones I read. Sarah longwell says democrats need to be less PROgressive and more AGGressive.
To put this differently: whichever faction of the Democratic tent is able to make the anti-Trump case will be the one that controls the party's agenda. That faction might be centrist "abundance" people, or it might be the far-left DSA types (Bernie and AOC certainly aren't losing the fight.) But the fight, not the policies will determine which we get.
My main objection to "abundance" is not that it's a bad idea. It's a great idea! It's just that it's a wonky policy idea that mostly distracts people from the basic retail politics they need to be doing to win 2026 and 2028.
Reading between the lines of the abundance critiques (which like you I’ve found to be in startlingly bad faith even from people I normally trust) the main reaction seems to be to reject the notion that “everything bagel liberalism” can possibly be a problem, let alone a big one.
I think a large part of that is insecurity: people are highly invested in small portions of the overall social agenda (or in being seen as supporting that part of the agenda), and worried that their particular hobbyhorse is ripe for ejection if the focus shifts from social issues to economic ones. And… they’re probably not wrong? But it does mean that they feel rightly or wrongly that they’re being cast as the enemy in the effort to organize against the orange man.
JM, this is the best synopsis of why I think the EK and DT approach will never work. Can you point to a liberal (ie left) government structure somewhere at sometime that fosters abundance—sure. Will you able to convert our current American structures to this form—I doubt it. Every change to prioritize “getting things done” rips through someone’s or some group’s reason for existing. And Democratic politics is just not set up to easily allow those types of changes. Hence inertia.
I think it needs to happen in a blue or purple state first, somewhere like PA or WI. (NC or KY would be even better, but GOP intransigence would wreck the project rather than allow a Democratic governor to chalk up any successes) They need to show both the rewards of success and a roadmap for lining up the pieces to make it happen.
Is New Jersey a possibility? It's mostly blue but we do elect Republican governors fairly often. ("Governor Yells-At-People" Chris Christie started out as an early Trump supporter but by 2023 had soured on him to the point where he campaigned in the Republican presidential primary on a "Trump bad" platform.)
I don't see why not! It would depend on the ability for city-level politicians to throw a wrench in the works.
Which means it realistically won't be relevant until 2032, or maybe 2036.
I think people are just worried that "don't worry, we promise that a decade from now we'll make you all rich and happy" isn't going to actually going to hold together a coalition the way policy wonks think it should. (Note: being skeptical about the politics does not mean it's bad policy.)
That might be, but if so I wish they’d come out and say that, and have the conversation on those terms. Instead I keep seeing all these bad faith takes that greatly misrepresent what the book proposes.
I mean, all I see right now on blogs like this is a bunch of people trying to make “abundance” into a winning political strategy for near-term elections. And as I said in another comment, I don’t think the authors were entirely naive to the notion that this would be a likely outcome of publishing their book at this particular political moment.
So I’m not really going to slag people for correctly responding to that notion (which is certainly the intention of many Twitter and Substack posters, if not the original authors.) If everyone in my neighborhood started demanding that we dress as Gontish wizards, I wouldn’t necessarily blame Ursula K. Leguin for writing “A Wizard of Earthsea” but I’d also probably push back against the wizard costume idea.
So i started Abundance since I last posted here. As someone who leans a teeny bit right (especially fiscally) i wonder what is the evidence that "...The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can."
That is, is there evidence that government is good at determining best investments. It seems to me that gov is simply another self interested institution.
Maybe the answer lies after page 14 lol.
They're talking about environmental externalities. But I'd add another aspect here: military preparedness. Ukraine just took out Russia's bombers with a bunch of battery-powered drones. America can't make many batteries.
And military preparedness has been an explicit goal that reaped significant benefits in the past: the National highway system has been a huge driver of economic development. My grandfather was a truck driver before those highways went in, and the level of knowledge needed just to transport goods was so much higher. After they were built, any old jerk could muddle his way from city to city, and transportation got so much easier and cheaper. That would never have happened even just left to the state governments.
That successful attack used a grand total of 117 drones, which together used less batteries than a single CyberTruck. I fully support the DOD buying drones (even naval ones like the joint Australian navy Anduril undersea Shark drone), but wasting money on consumer EV subsidies isn’t the way to do it.
The market doesn't care about externalities like smog from burning coal. The government does - evidence is the clean air act, etc.
It’s not that government is automatically the better decision maker. It’s that voters, acting through government, are capable of making value judgments beyond the mere numbers.
You could have 2 policies that have the same mathematical impact on GDP. But government/voters can make a decision based on other factors beyond.
As evidence that the decision making isn’t necessarily better: Both parties are now calling for stronger immigration enforcement. Voters are calling for it.
Yet virtually every economic study will show you that broader immigration, even broader “illegal immigration” is really good for economic growth.
So for good and bad, government and voters can make value judgments beyond the numbers.
The books opening chapter is not representative of the rest of the book . It’s a kind of urban utopia that is not necessarily going to be realized , The rest of the book is a very pragmatic look at how urban progressives have been unable to get good results in projects that provide solutions to homelessness and climate solutions and public transportation. Please read it but skip the laser eyes 😆
While other comments distinguish the claim from your question, if you are interested in evidence of the state's role in innovation, then I know a lot of people speak highly of The Entrepreneurial State. I also believe many of the people pushing for more government industrial policy cite Concrete Economics as a major influence.
Given that a lot of abundance policy debates take place at the local and state level, I’m skeptical how helpful it is to depict a president as the “villain” of the story.
It’s not Trump who’s making NYC’s housing expensive, it’s outer-borough city council members refusing to allow the construction of 5 story apartment buildings in their districts. It’s not Trump who makes subway construction so expensive, it’s mostly the MTA’s parochial practices.
Maybe depicting Trump and MAGA as the villains of anti-abundance makes for a good headline, but I don’t think it holds up to much scrutiny.
Like it or not, American politics is nationalized now. People think of a lot of stuff in terms of who the president is.
They also think of it in terms of red vs. blue states. So launching a political project whose aim is "let's make the blue states build more stuff like the red states" might be a great long-term policy goal, but will probably not be excellent politics for the next few cycles.
On the one hand they admit that Republican run states get things built much better than Democrat run states, but they still want to make Republicans the enemy anyway to avoid even speaking of the brutal intra-party knife fight that it would actually require to eliminate the elements of the Democratic coalition that are the problem here.. That's why they won't win.
Seems like the focus is on winning elections and being able to justify handouts to the usual suspects using “abundance” arguments rather than actually implementing anything approaching abundance-friendly policies.
The local level is where the biggest impacts could be felt- houses, roads, mass transit. The blue state are the laggards and are also where Dem money and Dem votes come from. Start there, if advocates are serious.
I think they know what they have to do, but they are terrified of Trump. Stating a party civil war would probably be a benefit to the Republicans for at least a couple of elections while they are still consolidating moderate voters, and I just don't think they have the balls to take that risk.
I suspect a lot of this is due to the availability of cheap land, not great policy. Go try to build a new house in Florida and get meaningful insurance.
It’s probably harder to get insurance in California.
Another theory I’ve heard is that because Texas and Florida have no income taxes and support their government with high property taxes, which are based on the price of the house there is a greater demand for cheap houses.
Litigation has also been an issue
https://www.fljustice.org/why-trial-lawyers-hate-floridas-insurance-market-reforms/
Actually the Trumps COULD reasonably be depicted as anti-abundance villains, because they were atypical among NYC's real estate developers in their enthusiasm for downzoning.
Fred Trump (Donald's dad) was the only major NYC developer to support the 1961 Zoning Resolution, while Donald himself supported an (ultimately rejected) plan to downzone much of Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Nobody cares what Fred Trump did. He's dead. Did Donald do any of that? Even if he did, it's just going to be hard to blame the guy who's got skyscrapers with his name on them for the inability to build things, especially in an area where the government who controls what is allowed to be built is run by people who rabidly hate him.
Being the double hater of both parties makes me quite lonely at times. I am mad at our professional politicians as they are failing the country. I do have to laugh sometimes at the absurdity of the calls for more anger. As if there already wasn’t enough anger to motivate people.
The statement that we have overregulated our country is not the beginning of a new progressive movement any more than it is the start of a permanent MAGA movement. I'd like to be quite clear about the movement that will consume the nation in the future.
It will be the debt and deficit movement. The problem with the MAGA Bill is not that it will add close to $4 trillion to our debt. The real problem is the $ 20-plus trillion in annual deficits going forward that will make our debt over $50 trillion.
A looming 23% mandatory cut to Social Security benefits in 2032 should be the clarifying moment for both parties. The Lauffer curve and subsequent results during the Reagan revolution did three things. Increased economic activity resulted in more tax collection. What is also true is that politicians, seeing the increase in tax collection, spent more money.
We continue to spend too much relative to the government's income. Republicans promise tax cuts to win elections, and Democrats promise more government spending to win elections. The result of these promises to their voters is that we have to borrow money to fulfill them.
We are running out of room to borrow forever, and $2 trillion a year in deficit spending will have to stop. It will stop because we soon will not be able to pay the interest and keep the level of spending we currently have without a tax increase. Borrowing costs will become unaffordable.
This is the truth: all the Abundance advocates are doing is rearranging the chairs on the Deck of the Titanic. MAGA BS, Trump BS is whistling past the graveyard, their monstrosity of a bill does nothing to deal with SS or Medicare insolvency or our debt. It is irresponsible, but no less reckless than anything Democrats would come up with. Both parties are destroying the country’s economic security while having cocktail parties over how wonderful they are.
The problem very much *is* the MAGA bill, because it includes major tax cuts that create further structural deficits. If Donald Trump just wanted to build new infrastructure with $4tn of one-off spending, it would be vastly easier for us to deal with in the future. (Yes I'm aware that the new cuts "expire" but so did the 2017 cuts which they're extending. This is just an accounting game.)
We can no longer afford tax cuts. This Congress might pass a new batch, but they'll have to be repealed before they expire, at least if we want to avoid fiscal disaster. And yes, we'll need spending cuts. But the US is a rich country and ultimately we'll be fine.
Well, if it turns out that Trump is a Putin dupe, with Tucker Carlson as his handler, what if I suggested that fiscal failure is on purpose?
Trump's interest in deficit-funded tax cuts is literally the only policy he has that's entirely, 100% consistent with traditional GOP policymaking. If he dropped dead tomorrow we'd probably be able to forget about his weird tariff fixation, but the tax cuts would stay front-and-center. Besides, Trump'll be gone in 1329 days, so his ability to destroy our finances is entirely dependent on the GOP continuing to be the GOP.
only 1329 days.....thank god for Vodka
You're not being properly pessimistic. They could make Trump the Speaker of the House (there's no rule that says the Speaker has to be a Congressman!) and have the President and VP both resign, and say that it doesn't violate the Constitution because he wasn't *elected*...
I actually don't think Trump is going to even try, because I think he's old and tired. Trump is always 100% about projecting strength and intention, no matter how ridiculous it is (think, Greenland and Canada) and even he is visibly not enthusiastic about seven more years of this.
Fixing the debt/deficit problem, or even stabilizing it, is going to be difficult because Americans fundamentally are OK with maxing out their credit cards to maximize current consumption.
Reagan tax cuts DID NOT increase economic activity, any more than any deficit spending would have. There is no supply side fairy. It is discouraging to read people talking about this BS as if it is a fact. It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you think you know that's not true- Mark Twain
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-we-learned-from-reagans-tax-cuts/
So true! The 80s were a grim period that made the 70s look like a lost utopia.
you sent me a slanted view from liberal Brookings I’ll send you the libertarian take
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/supply-side-tax-cuts-truth-about-reagan-economic-record
Thanks for sharing the source of your misconceptions. Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about the bipartisan, revenue-neutral 1986 tax bill (authored largely by NJ Sen Bill Bradley) but rather the 1981 ERTA, which " Supply-siders argued that the tax cuts would increase tax revenues; however, tax revenues declined relative to a baseline without the cuts because of the tax cuts, and the fiscal deficit ballooned during the Reagan presidency."(wikipedia) That's why Congress raised taxes several times in the 80s.
Re the Laffer Curve :https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/18/can-countries-lower-taxes-and-raise-revenues
I actually agree that the US needs to get its fiscal house in order, see Yale Budget Lab simulator to play with various options to do that
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/topic/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act
Cutting taxes for the rich and benefits (health care and food stamps) for the poor as is being proposed is only going to worsen the budget deficit, as CBO and JCT have shown
Tax cuts and spending increases are the problem. Revenue at 17 or 18 percent of GDP and spending at 20 to 22 percent is the problem. I didn’t like the GW Bush tax cuts, and I didn’t think all of the 2017 tax cuts were needed.
I don’t think we should extend those 2017 tax cuts; the American public needs to understand there is a limit to the credit card. Are there targeted tax cuts that I support? Sure. Right now, if we have a severe recession, we’ll only have the Fed, they’ll buy debt and print money....Neither is a good story.
Completely agree! Now is the time to cut back on fiscal stimulus and create room for the Fed to lower rates if they need to.
Sic 'em, Noah!
If we should be "mad" about tariffs, we should be near homicidally enraged about the deficit creating tax cuts and jumping up and down furious at the discouragement of skilled and educated foreigners to come to study, work, and live.
One of the problems of "Abundance" was failure to take on these larger obstacles to growth.
The part about foreigners is going to be a tough sell, though. Looking across the world, xenophobia is an easy sell, deliberately allowing more diversity is a hard sell, even if it comes with direct financial rewards.
But at lest it should have been in the book.
It's not as either/or as you paint it. You want to run against Trump instead of oligarchy. Why not run against "Trump and his billionaire friends"?
OK, sure. But the antimonopoly progressives spend a ton of time talking about Mark Zuckerberg and Google. Do we really think that the cost of search ads, or the fact that Meta owns both WhatsApp and Instagram, is what's hurting middle-class Americans right now??
Not those things, but don’t undersell “middle class families are experiencing a lot of angst and drama because they’re fighting on Facebook” and the message that Zuckerberg is directly getting wealthy by monetizing their family strife.
Creating abundance for the middle class will require systemic changes that will disrupt entrenched power brokers. Those who benefit from the system will want to preserve the system.
Because its a dumb strategy when you have a bunch of well known billionaire friends too.
you have a point there. maybe its time to rethink that (and Chuck Schumer too) and tell them they need to be on board if they want to stay friends
Agreed. I think the goal is to run against the system that Trump and his billionaire friends are creating that pulls up the bottom rungs of the ladder to the American Dream - upward mobility and prosperity. In other words Trump and his billionaire bros are seeking to make the American Dream scarce a commodity that is only available to people who are loyal and willing to forgo democratic freedom for material wealth. Democrats should focus on the abundance of the American Dream and create vibes around a set of policies that reinstall the bottom rungs of the ladder. Focusing on supply of education, supply of opportunity, supply of housing, and supply of healthcare is much better than simply subsidizing the expense (typical democratic policies) which only increases the costs. Additionally if you are able to expand the supply of these commodities you expand the supply of jobs available which will be critical if the AI disruption to professional jobs occurs as many predict.
When it’s just a few words of rhetoric, say whatever polls best. But if you want a full coherent plan that isn’t just a patchwork of individual popular sentences, you need them to reinforce each other.
If you think the problem is big corporations, then you start trying to break them up regardless of whether they are providing good things for people or not. But if you think the problem is people not having enough housing, energy, innovation, etc, then you figure out on each occasion whether it’s a corporate structure that is choking it off or a government regulation, and you try to fix whatever it is (unless it’s there to provide some greater abundance elsewhere, like the clean water act).
Agreed, a full coherent plan looks more like what is happening in the Defense Industrial Base. The government is focused on the scarcity of the DIB and is trying a full patchwork of policies to address these challenges. I asked Claude to help drafting this, so I haven't checked the details, but this and more is happening to address the scarcity for defense. Abundance policies will always require systemic change because the entrenched power brokers benefit from the status quo.
Based on my research, I can provide you with substantial data and detail to enhance your comment about government efforts to create abundance in the defense industrial base. Here's comprehensive information to strengthen your points:
Defense Production Act Expansion
The Department of Defense has significantly ramped up Defense Production Act Investment (DPAI) funding, with recent awards totaling hundreds of millions: $6.56 million to Montana Technological University for critical workforce development, $20 million to Electra Battery Materials Corporation for cobalt sulfate production, $11.8 million to Lithium Nevada Corporation for lithium carbonate extraction, $23 million to Constellium Muscle Shoals for aluminum production, and $20 million to South32 for manganese production MCEIP - DPAI - Defense Production Act Title III. The DPA is set to expire in September 2025 unless Congress reauthorizes it, with experts calling for modernization to better serve 21st century defense needs Reauthorize the Defense Production Act, but make changes for the 21st century - Breaking Defense.
Office of Strategic Capital Investment Program
The Office of Strategic Capital is now accepting loan applications with up to $984 million available for direct loans ranging from $10 million to $150 million each DOD’s Office of Strategic Capital accepting loan applications as it looks to lend up to $984M | DefenseScoop. OSC received more than 200 applications totaling $8.9 billion in financing requests for its inaugural credit product for American manufacturing Office of Strategic Capital Receives $8.9 Billion in Financing Requests for First Domestic. These loans target 31 covered technology categories including advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, quantum computing, and microelectronics, with eligible companies not required to have any existing DOD contracts DOD Office of Strategic Capital Begins Its Direct Lending Efforts to Secure U.S. Industrial Base | Inside Government Contracts.
Executive Orders Streamlining Defense Acquisitions
A significant executive order was issued in April 2025 specifically targeting defense acquisition reform. The "Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base" executive order directs the Secretary of Defense to eliminate unnecessary regulations, promote expedited acquisitions, apply a "ten-for-one rule" for new regulations, and scrutinize any Major Defense Acquisition Program that is more than 15% behind schedule or over cost for potential cancellation The White HouseThe White House.
Anduril and Palantir Strategic Positioning
Palantir and Anduril are forming a consortium with tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Saronic to jointly bid for Pentagon contracts, explicitly challenging the dominance of traditional defense primes like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing SiliconANGLEReuters. Anduril recently won a $100 million contract from the Chief Digital and AI Office to scale edge data integration services and is heavily involved in the Pentagon's Replicator initiative, while Palantir secured a $480 million Maven Smart System contract and $178 million for the Army's TITAN program Palantir, Anduril form new alliance to merge AI capabilities for defense customers | DefenseScoop.
Defense Primes Under Pressure
Critics argue that the U.S. defense industry has become dominated by a "cartel" of five major contractors (Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon) that control 86% of major program spending, up from just 6% in 1989 Lockheed, Boeing & Northrop Will Be The Reason Why U.S. Could Lose The Next War, Experts Warn; Here’s Why. What was once a field of roughly 75 major aerospace companies in 1980 has consolidated into just five prime contractors by 2001, with the Pentagon now having only three major military aircraft suppliers compared to eight in 1990 What’s Left of the Defense Industry | Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Additional Examples of Fast-Track Measures
Beyond the executive orders you mentioned, other streamlining efforts include:
The FY 2024 NDAA established streamlined requirements development processes to improve alignment with modern technologies and reduce delivery time The FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act: Key Provisions Government Contractors Should Know | Crowell & Moring LLP
Congress set Pentagon R&D spending at $141 billion for FY 2025, with new authorities allowing DOD to initiate new programs under continuing resolutions if they meet certain requirements Congress sets Pentagon research, development, test and evaluation spending at $141B | DefenseScoop
OSC loans are not subject to typical Federal Acquisition Regulations, providing more flexibility than traditional government contracting DOD Office of Strategic Capital Begins Its Direct Lending Efforts to Secure U.S. Industrial Base | Inside Government Contracts
This data demonstrates a comprehensive, multi-pronged approach by the government to reshape the defense industrial base through financial incentives, regulatory reform, and support for emerging competitors to challenge the traditional prime contractor oligopoly.
The point is that we can do both without a problem. We can at the same time renew antitrust while at the same time clearing obstacles to growth. They are not at all mutually contradictory. Neither is the messaging, which was my original point
One more point - antitrust doesnt mean that you break up all large corps simply because they are large. the law permits discretion - you can break up those that are hurting people by being large and leave those that arent for later (or never). There is no "regardless" about it
Antitrust generally doesn’t. But if you claim that your goal is to take down the power of big corporations, then that is what you are promising to do.
As a former Federal employee, I am all for government reform and agree with many of the abundance concepts. Promising and not delivering is not a path forward for any political movement. Clearly part of Trump's appeal is doing the things he said he would (or at least look like he is doing something). But this is necessary and not sufficient. Abundance is fundamentally a technocratic solution that avoids hard political questions. Will D's benefit from advocating for more port automation? Will the abundance agenda let the D's leave the culture wars behind? Does the abundance education agenda include testing and advanced high school courses? How do you make this appealing to the non-college educated? The anti-Trump first approach has gotten him elected twice.
"Trump is canceling EV credits and solar subsidies ... it’s going to mean higher electricity bills."
Sometimes you say some really dumb stuff. Subsidizing something doesn't make it cheaper. It makes it more expensive--you're just paying for it through taxes instead.
This isn't a very serious criticism. A huge amount of the IRA subsidies were aimed at building new manufacturing capacity, including new factory capacity, and we got a ton of that [1].
[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-and-chips-act-are-supercharging-us-manufacturing-construction/
Yes, we spent a ton of money. Has that made the stuff they're building any cheaper? Nope! Sounds like a pretty awful investment.
I mean I don’t know. I’d assume that building large amounts of new supply will eventually bring prices down from where they would be otherwise. I believe that because it’s common sense and basic economics.
There are certainly valid criticisms of some of Biden’s policies, but it seems like you aren’t making those here.
Generally speaking, investments take time to make a profit; this is especially true concerning manufacturing, which has steep upfront fixed costs that have to be paid for with years of (profitable) production. Most of those factories were going through the permit-approval/building process when Trump came into power, so it's disingenuous to say that it was all for nothing.
And the American people have been sensitive to that… when?
Why not just call it the affordable everything movement? Abundance doesn’t make sense to the average Joe.
I think that just has more syllables? Idk, but in any case, I'm not sure these movement names matter to the median voter. I think just "You deserve a cheaper house" will work.
Because “affordable housing” literally means price controls in the current world. They took the word already. “Housing abundance” is the term that means that houses come down in price at all points on the spectrum, rather than deciding one price point that is “affordable” and mandating that a few new houses come up at that level, while every other level remains artificially elevated.
Progressive housing policy is basically bread lines for affordable housing.
I know it means “price controls” for ignorant progressives. I live in a progressive town with skyrocketing prices, yet geniuses here come door to door with the same degrowth and “force greedy developers to sell some apartments for less” solutions. The city is going through an apartment building increase and progressives are freaking out and digging their heels about “greed” yet can’t see they’ve driven all the young out of town with their policies.
Yes- “affordable housing” is about ensuring the government controls which connected developer gets to build the one or two new projects allowed, which offer expensive prices for 90 percent of the new units as they subsidise the below market pricing of the “affordable” units that the friends and relatives of pols and public sector employees might get the first crack at (the developer will have a list of high priority names).
It is a scam.
I prefer to think of this as the Star Trek movement. For every kid who watched Star Trek as a kid, and thought a techno utopia sounded like a nice place to live, this is the most direct path there! It doesn’t require giving up any liberal goals, either; everything the progressive movement wants to do becomes easier when the population feels wealthy and happy and secure, and when we invest heavily in human ingenuity.
Because Klein would rather be acknowledged as “smart” and lose than “popular” and win. It’s the built-in mechanism of elite institution members to distinguish themselves as better (language, virtue signaling, etc), and no way can Klein get away from decades of habit.
I’m pretty sure he explicitly says he isn’t writing a campaign strategy, it’s a policy orientation.
Enacting “abundance” policies will require a different approach when it comes to that first step of winning an election.
But this post is explicitly arguing that it should be a political movement as well. And I think a lot of other folks ("on the Internet") have taken it that way as well. Which is, I think, really the source of most of the disagreement you see cited in the body of Noah's post.
Maybe, but that’s not what the authors of the book itself would tell you that they’re trying to do. People who are fired up about the ideas in the book should then take the next step to turn it into a viable movement.
The authors of the book can say anything they want, but everything is political. These are political people. Without a political movement there won't be any "Abundance" agenda, and Ezra Klein is savvy enough to know that. That's why the argument Noah summarizes in his post is even taking place: because folks like Klein and Yglesias and Noah think this is the (political) way forward.
On the other hand, there are people who are skeptical of this as a short-term political agenda. This is being posed somewhat disingenuously as people being pro- and anti-"Abundance", but I think this is a much more narrow argument about what Democrats should be talking about in 2026 and 2028.
Even Noah (who is on the pro-Abundance-as-political strategy side) admits that as a political movement it won't work without some "anger" directed at Trump. I don't disagree. In fact I would simply go farther and say that raising an effective opposition to Trump is 98% of the political strategy the Democrats need to win, and ideas like Abundance are just a thin gloss of political icing on top of that. More concretely, if the person who effectively opposes Trump happens to coincidentally be in favor of "Abundance", we're more likely to get that policy agenda.
PS I will also add that, while I think the policy agenda is pretty good, there are some real risks to the political message. First off, we're not going to have any tangible results by '26 or '28, so I don't see how it helps at all in the near term. Insofar as the message gets interpreted (or twisted) into "all Blue-state Democratic governance sucks, but don't worry we have a long-term plan to make it less terrible" I can certainly see voters responding poorly to that message in '26 and '28.
The Let's Get Shit Done movement.
That's more like it tho they probably won't allow 'Shit' on airwaves so 'It' or 'Everything' would probably be better
"If the FCC fines us, it at least gets them off their asses to do something."
Trump's problem with trade deficits is easy to understand once you realize that his economic philosophy is straight-up pre-Adam Smith mercantilism: spending money makes a person poorer and getting money makes a person richer, so a country gets poorer when it gives money to other countries and gets richer when other countries give it money. As anyone who has taken an Econ 101 class knows, this is complete garbage when applied to the scale of an entire economy, because, as Adam Smith realized, a nation's wealth lies in its ability to produce goods and services, not in the amount of gold in its treasury.
Noah Smith has described running a trade deficit as you getting stuff and giving out IOUs in return. Trump thinks it's better to be the one holding the IOUs instead of the stuff, but I'd rather be able to have the things that money can buy instead of having the money itself and then not spending it.
I agree an actual abundance agenda would be great. The problem is that any abundance agenda that the Democrats built would have rent-seeking carve outs for every progressive goal.
Union wage guarantees. Check
Carve outs for minority owned businesses. Check.
Subsidies for green energy. Check.
Requirement that all businesses have gay or transgender affirmative action plans. Check.
Guaranteed free health care for illegal immigrants. Check.
Massive payouts to influential NGOs. Check
Extensive reviews (and delays) of the impact of construction on fish and bugs. Check
Again, the Abundance Agenda sounds hunky dory. But the argument is that the party of rent-seeking carve outs and top down dirigiste should seek abundance. The only way they could do this is by shifting to a completely 180 degree different party. You are as likely to get abundance from the Dems as getting Christianity out of a Satantic cult.
And, no I am not arguing the Republicans are better.
"But my instinct is to say that the abundance liberals need to get mad. And they need to get mad not at progressive NIMBYs and pressure groups, but at Donald Trump and the MAGA movement."
Noah, my brother, I am incandescently angry at Trump and his enablers, and have been angry at him for pretty much the past nine years (with an elevation to *nuclear level* on Jan 6, 2021). Where did that get me? If being Very Angry at Trump worked to get rid of him, wouldn't it have done so already?
Do we really have a shortage of political anger and zero-sum thinking in the United States in the Year of Our Lord 2025?
Anyway, I object to this kind of thing on principle. I love the classic Good vs. Evil stories: Star Wars, Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter. But I recognize them as *stories* I enjoy. In real life, sure, there are good and evil people, but most conflict isn't because the leader you hate is evil (unless you're in Putin's Russia); it's because both sides have a legitimate conflict of interest, there are limited resources, collective action problems, etc.
Consider housing. If I'm a renter, or if I have young adult children who want to buy a house, I want housing to be cheap. But if I own a house, and it is my single biggest investment that I count on to help me live comfortably in retirement, I want my house to appreciate in value, i.e., I want expensive housing. Both points of view are understandable and non-evil! But put them together and voila! Conflict.
Mature people understand that's what most conflict is like, instead of looking for villains everywhere.
2/3 of household own their home, while 1/3 rent. Rising home prices benefited the vast majority of households. There are numerous policies at the local, state, and federal level that have encouraged ownership of single family house and obligatory car-dependency ever since the 1950s. That's why the "American Dream" is to own a home and a car in the burbs- it means your in a position to benefit from all the implicit subsidies of that lifestyle. If you're renting and riding public transportation, you're the one paying for the subsidies of the dreamers.
This anti-monopolist stuff needs to be walked back a long, long way.
Jet Blue and Spirit were going to monopolize the air? Spirit is doing so well it is bankrupt.