This guy is pushing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson “Abundance Agenda,” which aims to offer an alternative to the Democratic Party’s current downer social justice agenda. I’m not going to cover that much, since I don’t think the “Abundance Agenda” has a snowball’s chance in hell of being adopted by the Party’s current ideological core. But I am posting this for his (admittedly incomplete) critique of how Democrats grievously harmed the very people they’re claiming to be working for by destroying the quality of life in the cities they run.
“Democrats, plain and simple, need to change not only to win elections, but also to help the people they claim to support.”
“Working and middle-class American families are leaving places like California, New York and Illinois by the hundreds of thousands, often relocating to conservative regions.” Just like I talked about earlier this week.
“In the words of progressive journalist Ezra Klein: ‘You cannot claim to be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live.'” Sure you can! You just need to deploy the time-honored Democratic Party rhetorical device known as “lying your ass off.”
“Donald Trump partly won the 2024 election due to scarcity in the most essential aspects of people’s lives: affordable health care [What, ObamaCare didn’t make health care affordable? I’m shocked… -LP], energy, food, and most importantly housing.”
“For much of America, housing is simply far too expensive. In American cities, especially the liberal progressive ones, there’s an artificial scarcity of housing, and little to none of the available housing is affordable.”
“In 1970 Los Angeles, homes were 2.5 times the median family income, according to Redfin. But in 2022, LA house prices reached over nine times that of median family incomes, requiring families to earn over $220,000 to afford a home.”
“Home ownership is increasingly out of reach for the average worker, and high housing costs have led to financial instability for far too many Americans.”
“Housing supply is partly constrained by zoning restrictions…When more and more individuals and families compete for a near fixed supply of housing stock, prices typically rise making cities unaffordable for existing residents.” You mean like, say, importing millions of illegal aliens to compete with American citizens for limited housing stock?
“Many of America’s most prosperous cities, from New York and Boston to Seattle and San Francisco, heavily restrict the construction of new housing, especially the taller, denser buildings which could house more people, but that’s not the case in all of them.”
“Houston, Texas for example, has some of the most affordable housing and lowest homelessness rates in the country, despite its metro region holding over 7 million residents. This is in part because Houston has essentially no zoning. As a result, because it is extremely easy to build apartments and homes in much of the city, market forces can provide new housing at a variety of price points.”
“In liberal cities attempts, at building housing and infrastructure are often so expensive and inefficient that very little is actually built for low-income Americans. Take San Francisco, for example. The city’s numerous requirements for using public money add millions of dollars to the cost of construction, causing the typical publicly subsidized apartment to take six years to complete with a price tag of 600K per unit.” So affordable!
“San Francisco requires separate reviews from the city’s arts commission and Office of Disability, mandates electricity come from a city-owned utility company, and demands preferential treatment to small local contractors, meaning builders are discouraged from working with contractors who operate at scale.”
“Individually each requirement may seem well-meaning and progressive, but together they cause delays increase costs and ultimately limit the construction of housing for the poor, which clearly is not a progressive outcome.”
“Obstacles aren’t restricted to liberal cities like San Francisco these days building anything in America often requires jumping through a multitude of veto points, allowing interest groups, organizations and hyper local concerns to stop critical projects in their tracks.” Oh, that’s very “progressive” and by design, because every obstacle, every bureaucratic touch-point, provides opportunities for rent- and graft-seeking opportunities to grease the palms of progressives. Look at Austin’s “Reimagining Public Safety” and how just about every recommendation amounts to “take money away from the police and give it to us. This death by a thousand cuts doesn’t deserve the assumption of “good intentions.” It’s a racket that rakes off graft for the hard left.
At this point the author wanders off into more “good intentions, bad outcomes” examples, like environmentalism etc., but non-lefties no longer assume good intentions on the part of the Democratic Party.
Things he fails to mention: How high crime in blue cities with Soros-back prosecutors ruin the quality of life for poor and middle class Americans, and (again) how the huge influx of illegal aliens raises housing prices and sucks up resources that used to benefit American citizens.
Toward the end he states “Democratic doctrine often focuses so much on redistribution rather than growing the pie as a whole,” sounding rather like Jack Kemp or Newt Gingrich in 1994. And I’m pretty sure Democrats at the time either ignored them or called them Nazis.
But the baseline truth is that the ideological core of the Democratic Party wants nothing to do with your white boy “abundance agenda” because it directly conflicts with their primary goals of increasing their own abundance of wealth and power, taking full control of the Democratic Party and using it to destroy Americas existing structures to rebuild them into their imaginary socialist utopia.
You can’t make someone see the advantages of your “abundance agenda” if their entire likelihoods are predicated on not seeing it.
The point of all this is to increase, not decrease, suffering. This is done because the Democratic party relies on suffering to create Democratic voters.
WalletHub published their annual ‘Most Affordable Cities to Buy a Home’ article, written by Adam McCann, on May 20, 2025.
Flint and Detroit were Numbers 1 and 2. Fort Wayne and Indianapolis were Numbers 9 and 10. Columbus, OH was Number 39. San Antonio was the highest ranked Texas city at Number 163.
In 1960, Cleveland, Ohio boasted its own Federal Reserve bank, was home to Shaker Height–the toniest suburb in America and had a larger number of corporate headquarters than any US city.
Today, it’s population. is 1/4 what it was at its peak, meaning that many houses have been abandoned and are crumbling ruins.
What happened?
The 1964 race riots convinced many that the city had become a dangerous place to leave, prompting an exodus to the suburbs. The Environmental Protection Act fell.heavily on area industry and the old steel mills were not well suited to being made compliant. Many foreign countries rebuild their industrial base following the destruction of WW II
In 1960, Cleveland, Ohio boasted its own Federal Reserve bank, was home to Shaker Height–the toniest suburb in America and had a larger number of corporate headquarters than any US city.
Today, it’s population. is 1/4 what it was at its peak, meaning that many houses have been abandoned and are crumbling ruins.
What happened?
The 1964 race riots convinced many that the city had become a dangerous place to live, prompting an exodus to the suburbs. The Environmental Protection Act fell.heavily on area industry and the old steel mills were not well suited to being made compliant. Many foreign countries rebuild their industrial base following the destruction of WW II. Their factories were more modern and more efficient.
It became cheaper to import foreign steel and automobiles than to made them domestically. Displaced factory workers relocated to construction, distribution and retail. Shopping malls were ubiquitous. No one seemed to notice that living standards held steady but much of it was debt financed.
So we find ourselves with record debt, unending federal deficits and stagnant wages.This makes the purchase of a new home prohibitive. Half the country cannot afford a $250k home and average home prices are approaching $500k.
The cities that were abandoned in the 1960s are ripe for “recolonization” but the crime level and excessive federal regulations that made them uninhabitable will have to e rectified. Democrats can reclaim their mojo by strict policing and relaxed environmental enforcement.
Cleveland’s demise started with the terrifying East Ohio Gas Company explosion and fire during 1944. It wiped out one square mile immediately north of the Hough neighborhood (where the 1966 riot occurred) and 131 people were burned alive. Thousands were injured. Cleveland’s big wigs, a business oligarchy, diverted U.S. urban renewal money to redevelop the downtown area (including the fire area) and left the neighborhoods to rot.
The U. S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings in Cleveland during April 1966. The testimonies at these hearings agitated the Hough neighborhood and was the proximate cause of the riot there in July 1966. Black nationalists and socialists spread their poisonous ideology throughout the black community and primed the area for a riot. It wasn’t much of a riot by Detroit standards, but it was enough to trigger white flight.
Cleveland was an environmental nightmare. The Cuyahoga River caught fire so many times nobody in the area considered it news. After the 1969 river fire, the administration of Mayor Stokes diverted federal monies to river clean up, the neighborhoods got even worse, and the downtown began to decline.
The middle class left Cleveland and corporate Pac Man games gradually destroyed the industry which had made Cleveland great, albeit at the cost of horrible pollution. The worst loss was the evisceration of TRW, which was a key member of the United States’ military-industrial complex. They were exceptionally competent. Only three industrial employers still have significant operations in the Greater Cleveland area. Cleveland Clinic is by far the largest employer.
The one huge thing the Dems have in their favor is their near total capture of the media, academia, Hollywood, etc. that allows them to brainwash most of the population. Even “right” wing folks I know scream bloody murder about Federal job cuts let alone cuts to Medicaid/Medicare. The Dems have also managed to get almost all American so addicted to government handouts/programs, it’s impossible to cut the budget (especially when you have so many spineless RINOs in Congress). Rare is the family who doesn’t use some sort of Federal program (for example, my daughter is going to school using my GI Bill benefits).
The one huge thing the Dems have in their favor is their near total capture of the media, academia, Hollywood, etc. that allows them to brainwash most of the population.
I define the “left” as being the coalition of pundits, activists, etc. who push ideas & policies that are currently popular in academia. These are often contradictory, but most on the left either don’t notice, or think that the ideas opposed to theirs are less of a threat than their opposition from outside academia.
There are two issues with the analysis of the video and Abundance itself
1) It is of the classic let the specialists run things and all will be well which is the answer of modern leftists. The problem is economic systems are highly chaotic and cannot be managed effectively without essentially infinite information. That effectively violates much of information theory as well as requiring G*d like powers (clearly not in evidence). Thus the amazing “successes” of the various Soviet and CCP 5 year plans.
2) Leftism assumes Man is perfectible. Once again a fact clearly not in evidence over thousands of years of human civilization I suspect Large portions of the Democrat Upper Echelons would echo O’Brien from 1984
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”
Sadly for this gentleman and the authors of Abundance they are likely viewed as “Useful Idiots”
The person in this spiel denigrates D.O.G.E. but yet its actions are exactly his first step in removing waste and red tape. His issue is that it doesn’t follow his second step, giving him and similar like-minded blithering idiots control. The better choice is to release that control to the most distributed level possible and let people (and market forces) choose the path as there is no one able to gather the knowledge needed to make the optimal decisions directly.
The point of all this is to increase, not decrease, suffering. This is done because the Democratic party relies on suffering to create Democratic voters.
WalletHub published their annual ‘Most Affordable Cities to Buy a Home’ article, written by Adam McCann, on May 20, 2025.
Flint and Detroit were Numbers 1 and 2. Fort Wayne and Indianapolis were Numbers 9 and 10. Columbus, OH was Number 39. San Antonio was the highest ranked Texas city at Number 163.
In 1960, Cleveland, Ohio boasted its own Federal Reserve bank, was home to Shaker Height–the toniest suburb in America and had a larger number of corporate headquarters than any US city.
Today, it’s population. is 1/4 what it was at its peak, meaning that many houses have been abandoned and are crumbling ruins.
What happened?
The 1964 race riots convinced many that the city had become a dangerous place to leave, prompting an exodus to the suburbs. The Environmental Protection Act fell.heavily on area industry and the old steel mills were not well suited to being made compliant. Many foreign countries rebuild their industrial base following the destruction of WW II
In 1960, Cleveland, Ohio boasted its own Federal Reserve bank, was home to Shaker Height–the toniest suburb in America and had a larger number of corporate headquarters than any US city.
Today, it’s population. is 1/4 what it was at its peak, meaning that many houses have been abandoned and are crumbling ruins.
What happened?
The 1964 race riots convinced many that the city had become a dangerous place to live, prompting an exodus to the suburbs. The Environmental Protection Act fell.heavily on area industry and the old steel mills were not well suited to being made compliant. Many foreign countries rebuild their industrial base following the destruction of WW II. Their factories were more modern and more efficient.
It became cheaper to import foreign steel and automobiles than to made them domestically. Displaced factory workers relocated to construction, distribution and retail. Shopping malls were ubiquitous. No one seemed to notice that living standards held steady but much of it was debt financed.
So we find ourselves with record debt, unending federal deficits and stagnant wages.This makes the purchase of a new home prohibitive. Half the country cannot afford a $250k home and average home prices are approaching $500k.
The cities that were abandoned in the 1960s are ripe for “recolonization” but the crime level and excessive federal regulations that made them uninhabitable will have to e rectified. Democrats can reclaim their mojo by strict policing and relaxed environmental enforcement.
Cleveland’s demise started with the terrifying East Ohio Gas Company explosion and fire during 1944. It wiped out one square mile immediately north of the Hough neighborhood (where the 1966 riot occurred) and 131 people were burned alive. Thousands were injured. Cleveland’s big wigs, a business oligarchy, diverted U.S. urban renewal money to redevelop the downtown area (including the fire area) and left the neighborhoods to rot.
The U. S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings in Cleveland during April 1966. The testimonies at these hearings agitated the Hough neighborhood and was the proximate cause of the riot there in July 1966. Black nationalists and socialists spread their poisonous ideology throughout the black community and primed the area for a riot. It wasn’t much of a riot by Detroit standards, but it was enough to trigger white flight.
Cleveland was an environmental nightmare. The Cuyahoga River caught fire so many times nobody in the area considered it news. After the 1969 river fire, the administration of Mayor Stokes diverted federal monies to river clean up, the neighborhoods got even worse, and the downtown began to decline.
The middle class left Cleveland and corporate Pac Man games gradually destroyed the industry which had made Cleveland great, albeit at the cost of horrible pollution. The worst loss was the evisceration of TRW, which was a key member of the United States’ military-industrial complex. They were exceptionally competent. Only three industrial employers still have significant operations in the Greater Cleveland area. Cleveland Clinic is by far the largest employer.
The one huge thing the Dems have in their favor is their near total capture of the media, academia, Hollywood, etc. that allows them to brainwash most of the population. Even “right” wing folks I know scream bloody murder about Federal job cuts let alone cuts to Medicaid/Medicare. The Dems have also managed to get almost all American so addicted to government handouts/programs, it’s impossible to cut the budget (especially when you have so many spineless RINOs in Congress). Rare is the family who doesn’t use some sort of Federal program (for example, my daughter is going to school using my GI Bill benefits).
I define the “left” as being the coalition of pundits, activists, etc. who push ideas & policies that are currently popular in academia. These are often contradictory, but most on the left either don’t notice, or think that the ideas opposed to theirs are less of a threat than their opposition from outside academia.
There are two issues with the analysis of the video and Abundance itself
1) It is of the classic let the specialists run things and all will be well which is the answer of modern leftists. The problem is economic systems are highly chaotic and cannot be managed effectively without essentially infinite information. That effectively violates much of information theory as well as requiring G*d like powers (clearly not in evidence). Thus the amazing “successes” of the various Soviet and CCP 5 year plans.
2) Leftism assumes Man is perfectible. Once again a fact clearly not in evidence over thousands of years of human civilization I suspect Large portions of the Democrat Upper Echelons would echo O’Brien from 1984
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”
Sadly for this gentleman and the authors of Abundance they are likely viewed as “Useful Idiots”
The person in this spiel denigrates D.O.G.E. but yet its actions are exactly his first step in removing waste and red tape. His issue is that it doesn’t follow his second step, giving him and similar like-minded blithering idiots control. The better choice is to release that control to the most distributed level possible and let people (and market forces) choose the path as there is no one able to gather the knowledge needed to make the optimal decisions directly.