Posts Tagged ‘Derek Thompson’

How Democrats Ruined Cities

Saturday, May 31st, 2025

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.
  • “The top five cities with the largest homeless populations are all governed by Democrats.” That might have something to do with the fact that the Homeless Industrial Complex rakes graft off them.
  • “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.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 8 Comments »

    Refuting Derek Thompson (or, Newsweek’s Self-Inflicted Wounds)

    Friday, October 19th, 2012

    Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has a piece up laying the blame for Newsweek’s on the economy. “This is an economic story, plain and simple. The print news business is grim and hardly needs a lengthy explication.” Well, I’m sure the economy didn’t help. But the story of Newsweek‘s demise is not that plain, nor that simple.

    I was going to laboriously track down magazine circulation data, enter it into Excel, and create a chart. Then I found that State of the Media had done it for me:

    Notice how Time, Newsweek‘s chief competitor, starts sucking wind before the recession hits full force, then stabilizes, while Newsweek goes into freefall, then continues? In fact, Newsweek‘s nosedive gets steeper in 2009, right about the time the recession was bottoming out around the New Obama Normal. What could have happened then?

    While conservatives had long complained of Newsweek‘s liberal bias, it was 2009 when Newsweek finally gave up their pretense of being neutral and all but announced they were in the tank for Obama.

    They practically came out and said they weren’t interested in conservatives reading their magazine. The chart above tells you how well that decision worked out for them.

    As I said yesterday, Newsweek‘s demise is a case of assisted suicide. They had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

    (And here’s an excuse to link to that Iowahawk piece on Newsweek again.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    ObamaCare Votes Doomed Democrats

    Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

    I’m sure the average BattleSwarm reader came to this conclusion heretofore, but Derek Thompson provides a statistical roundup in The Atlantic that proves it. They also find lesser effects for the other three votes I’ve highlighted here (Stimulus, TARP, and Cap-and-Trade):

    For Democrats in the least Democratic districts, the model suggests a loss of about 4 percent for every yes vote. If vulnerable Democrats hadn’t voted for any of the four bills, he concludes, Democrats would have won 32 more seats, enough to retain control of the House. Even after you remove TARP (which was a must-vote in scary times), the three-vote impact was 24 seats — not enough to keep the House, but close.

    Although at least one study he cites shows no effect for the last that can’t be explained for the other three.

    But it all comes back to what all non-liberal Americans have been telling Democrats for a year or longer: It’s the ObamaCare, stupid.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, ObamaCare | 1 Comment »