The Trump administration is finally confronting the complicated reality of its complex and costly tariff policies.
Oh, not when it comes to collecting those tariffs. The administration is happy to keep doing that.
But if the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Trump’s tariffs are illegal and requires the administration to issue refunds—then, suddenly, the complexity is an unsolvable problem. At least, that’s the line that Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, is trying out.
If the Supreme Court rules against Trump’s tariffs, “it’s going to be pretty unlikely that they’re going to call for widespread refunds, because it would be an administrative problem to get those refunds out to there,” Hassett told CBS News on Sunday.
“It’d be very complicated,” he added. “It’s a mess, and that’s why I think the Supreme Court wouldn’t do it.”
As a legal matter, it would certainly be strange for the Supreme Court to decide that the Trump administration had unlawfully imposed tariffs but also decide that it is just too gosh darn difficult to set things right.
By comparison, refunding tariff payments is relatively easy. There are records of those payments, and all the federal government would have to do is issue refunds to the American importers and businesses that paid those taxes over the course of the past several months. It would be politically awkward after all thatmisleading talk about how other countries are paying the tariffs, but not difficult.
Indeed, the federal government collected over $5 trillion in taxes last year and spent over $7 trillion. But processing roughly $200 billion in tariff refunds is prohibitively complicated? Give me a break.
Still, the real kicker here is how Hassett is positioning the Trump administration as the victim. If he thinks refunding the tariffs would be complicated, wait until he sees what goes into collecting them in the first place.
The Trump administration’s tariff policies have created a process that is “mind-numbingly difficult for even the most skilled technicians and biggest corporations,” wrote Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, earlier this month in a must-read dive into the complexity of the tariff regime. For smaller businesses without the connections, staff, or resources to navigate the tariffs, the past nine months have been a nightmare.
Lincicome and his team at Cato also put together this fantastic infographic to illustrate the maze that all American imports must now navigate.
Source: Cato Institute (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2025-12/tariff-flowchart/tariff_flowchart_zoom_v3.png)
Adding to the complexity is the fact that tariff rates and exemptions have changed from week to week depending on Trump’s mood. A fact sheet published in August by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which was ostensibly meant to help businesses comply with the new rules, contains a darkly hilarious disclaimer saying that it should not be relied upon because “exemptions and details of each tariff action are not fully covered.” The tariffs are so complicated that even the government agency tasked with enforcing them can’t accurately describe what they are.
Against that backdrop, Hassett’s comments about the complexity of refunding the tariffs are not just laughable but downright infuriating.
The Trump administration has forced American businesses to navigate an ever-changing gauntlet of new regulations in order to pay higher taxes that were imposed via questionably legal means and without congressional authorization. If the Supreme Court decides that refunds are necessary to ensure that justice is done, there will be approximately zero sympathy for the federal officials who created this “mess” in the first place.
Lina Khan has quickly thrown water on any hopes that she might be a benign force on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team. The former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair suggested in a recent interview that she’s looking to make sure Mamdani can “unilaterally deploy” ample power as mayor.
Khan is “exploring ways to maximize…Mamdani’s executive authority through little-used laws already in place,” as Bloombergput it.
“Exploring ways to maximize executive authority” is a scary enough phrase no matter who the executive in question is. But it’s got a particularly chilling ring when applied to Mandami, a Democratic Socialist who has said there’s no problem too minor for the government to get involved in, and Khan, who spearheaded some of the Biden administration’s worst efforts to disrupt free markets with heavy-handed government intervention, repeatedly tested the limits of FTC power, and attempted to do through an executive agency things that should have been left to Congress.
“I’m gonna be especially focused on things like ‘how do we make sure that we have a full accounting of all of the laws and authorities that the mayor can unilaterally deploy?’” Khan said in the interview, which was taped last week but won’t air in full until November 23. She went on to talk about how her time at the FTC taught her there were “unused and underused” powers that she could wield, and she wanted to find out the full extent of authority that would be possible for Mandami as mayor.
With Khan’s influence, we can expect the future Mamdani mayoral administration to get creative—and, perhaps, unconstitutional—in its application of existing laws and authorities to enact Mamdani’s agenda, which includes things like city-run grocery stores, free child care and bus rides, nearly doubling the minimum wage, and a freeze on raising rents.
Much of Mamdani’s agenda would require acquiescence from state government authorities, which may make enacting it a stretch.
Khan apparently isn’t phased. “A lot of what he is going to be looking to deliver is going to be requiring working closely with other institutional actors, be it the governor, be it the legislature, but he should also have a lot of ability to do things unilaterally,” she told Vietor.
She also seems intent on taking elements of the Biden administration’s failed agenda to the Big Apple. “Khan is planning to look at recently-enacted and proposed legislation and regulations affecting algorithmic price discrimination, surveillance pricing and junk fees,” Bloomberg reports.
And, of course, no Khan operation would be complete without a little bit of absolutely overreaching antitrust policy.
At the FTC, Khan went after tech platforms and other companies “under novel theories of harm,” notes Liz Hoffman at Semafor. “In her new role, Khan has identified an early avenue in a 56-year-old NYC prohibition on business practices deemed ‘unconscionable’—a designation expansive enough to delight any regulator.”
This could include targeting stadiums for selling high-price concessions, Hoffman reports. (No problem too small for government action, indeed.)
If Khan’s influence takes hold, we can expect from the future Mamdani administration not just big meddling in significant aspects of city life but also the sort of low-grade authoritarianism we saw attempted under Biden, who rallied against the way cable bills were formatted and airline ticket fees were displayed.
Using the might power of the state to make stadium hot dogs cheaper is a perfect distillation of the sort of petty populism that Khan has come to be known for—and Mamdani may, alas, be angling to adopt as NYC mayor.
As I write this, I have yet to cast my vote for the mayor of New York City, where I live (a question I can answer more easily and definitively than the current mayor). In most elections, there are only two bad choices. But because New York has more of everything, from people to rats to unlicensed weed dispensaries, this time there are at least three terrible choices: The Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, the Republican Curtis Sliwa, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running on the “Fight and Deliver Party” line.
Bad candidates are like unhappy families, each awful and terrible in their own way. But by all indications, only Mamdani matters because he is going to cruise to victory next Tuesday. When that happens, Andrew Cuomo, already hounded out of Albany due to terrible COVID policies and disturbing harassment of basically everyone he ever worked with, will disappear for good. Maybe he’ll live in South Florida like the next-in-line son of a deposed Shah or, in a more just world, in a tiny, market-rate studio apartment in Crown Heights with another disgraced politician, Anthony Weiner. The beret-wearing fabulist Curtis Sliwa will continue to haunt New York’s airwaves and local TV shows, talking about his cats and whatever else rambles like tumbleweeds through his mind.
Mamdani’s win will absolutely not be good for the city, but it will also not usher in the utter, instantaneous apocalypse that some fear. Yes, he will try to make buses and child care free, create city-owned grocery stores, jack up taxes on the ultra-rich (charitably defined as anyone making more than the “many young professionals at tech start-ups, law firms and investment companies” that seem to love him the most), and “freeze the rent” on perhaps as many as 1 million rental apartments (around half the total rental market). Maybe he will even issue an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because, well, that sort of dramatic, dubiously legal action is a huge part of being the mayor of New York (and of being a member of the Democratic Socialists of America).
If you live outside New York, your biggest worry should be what effect a landslide win might have on the Democratic Party nationally. If Mamdani crushes Cuomo and Sliwa as seems likely, expect a big push from allies like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) to revive the worst excesses of the populist identity politics that helped cost Democrats the White House in 2024 and caused much of the discord, overspending, and stupidity of the past decade. (If the centrist Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia win as currently expected, expect a ton of articles about the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.)
As Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller recently explained, Mamdani’s appeal goes beyond playing Santa Claus to large blocs of voters. He personifies the symbolic grievances of college-educated and relatively well-off Millennial and Gen Z voters who don’t really understand how capitalism works and what creative destruction entails. They take wealth production for granted, focusing instead on what they perceive as its morally just distribution, while overlooking the challenge of maintaining, much less expanding, economic and social opportunities for all.
For New York City, what Mamdani’s mayoralty will absolutely do is hurry along the slowly decaying orbit of the country’s largest city that commenced with the election of groundhog manhandler Bill de Blasio to two terms in Gracie Mansion and continued with the mediocre-at-best performance of Turkish Airlines enthusiast and cheese-detractor Eric Adams. We’re already a dozen-plus years into having the city run by bums or buffoons and, if you read histories like Richard E. Farley’s Drop Dead, you know this is how things go in New York City. There are long cycles of mediocre-to-terrible mayors (think of the years of Richard Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame, a period lasting from 1954 to 1977) that are interrupted by periods of better-than-average governance (think Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg, a span lasting from 1978 to 2013, exclusive of David Dinkins’ single term in the early ’90s).
New York has famously been called “the ungovernable city,” and in most ways, it is. Everything here is out of control; it is simultaneously the most regulated and freest autonomous zone imaginable. Yes, what happens here is deeply affected by politics and politicians, but those are just small streams that add to the powerful torrent of everyday life. After World War II, for a variety of reasons, New York flatlined in population in the 1950s and 1960s and then lost over 10 percent of its residents in the 1970s. Its population rebounded in the late ’80s, and the city has seen decades of sustained growth and vitality, even through events like 9/11, the financial crisis (felt deeply in the country’s finance center), and COVID (which posed particular issues for America’s most densely populated big city).
The city’s resurrection in the ’80s was in no way a foregone conclusion and was a combination of many factors. The most important parts included the invention of the contemporary financial industry that revved up so much so that by 1987 it provided the setting for Tom Wolfe’s era-defining novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, and its cast of “masters of the universe,” social justice warriors, and journalistic grifters. An influx of immigrants (both from abroad and various parts of America) flooded into a city with relatively abundant housing, reviving neighborhoods and areas written off long ago. But governance mattered greatly, too. The mayoralty of Ed Koch, a “liberal with sanity” who fought against rent control, crime, and excessive spending while personifying the city’s tolerance of all sorts of lifestyles, was an essential part of the renaissance, as we discussed in this 2011 interview.
But the fortunes of a city rarely rely solely or even mostly on its political class. In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, New York was hardly the only city in the Northeast and Midwest that was seeing major population declines as the U.S. economy became more post-industrial and the South and West opened for business in big ways. Yet New York’s elected officials exacerbated exodus and decline by promising more and more services to people and papering over growing budget shortfalls with all sorts of gimmicks and tricks that ultimately came undone in the mid-1970s.
Farley’s account in Drop Dead is detailed and appalling—and it comes with a warning for today: After cleaning up its fiscal act and getting its budget more or less in order, the city is reverting to its old tricks and running up annual shortfalls of $10 billion or more for the foreseeable future. The terms of the city’s bailout by the feds (contrary to the memorable Daily News headline, Gerald Ford, desperate for Empire State electoral votes, never told the city to “drop dead”) and the state legislature of New York mean that Mayor Mamdani will be tightly constrained in what he can do. Many of his proposals (such as freezing the rent) are either legally dubious or will have to go through Albany (such as almost anything related to the public transit system).
This is good news, because his agenda, in virtually every particular, will make New York a tougher place to live and run a business (and thus work as a regular employee), or even go to school—he wants to get rid of gifted-and-talented programs and entrance-exam schools which motivate striver parents with limited financial resources to leave an expensive and generally awful system.
His housing proposals are also sure to backfire. As Reason‘s Justin Zuckerman recently documented, the city is already experiencing a severe housing drought—partly as a direct result of 2019 changes to state laws eagerly signed by then-Gov. Cuomo. Far from making housing more affordable or available, freezing rents at current levels will incentivize renters to stay put (rental turnover here is already 41 percent lower than the national average) and do nothing to spur large-scale construction of new units (who will build in a place where they have little or no say over what they can charge?). The hunt for good apartments in New York will go from bad to worse.
“When I read [Mamdani’s] proposals,” writes Andrew Sullivan at Substack, “at first I thought I was reading a high-schooler’s essay. Free everything!” He’s onto something—most of Mamdani’s ideas have already been tried extensively and failed in the immediate past. Consider his promise to hike the minimum wage from $16.50 an hour to $30 an hour in a few years. As Jim Epstein showed a decade ago for Reason, a minimum wage hike to $15 had predictable and bad effects on the city’s car wash industry. Whatever the intentions, such moves “push[ed] car washes to automate and to close down.” As bad, the mandated wage increase also fostered “a growing black market—workers increasingly have no choice but to ply their trade out of illegal vans parked on the street, because the minimum wage has made it illegal for anyone to hire them at the market rate.”
None of this is rocket science or terra incognita. One of Mamdani’s signature proposals is the creation of city-run grocery stores, an idea that is especially nonsensical in a place like New York, which already is “the No. 1 U.S. metro area in terms of residents’ ‘equitable access’ to a local supermarket.” He or his advisers might look to the recent experience of Erie, Kansas, where things are not going well for government-run supermarkets. Or he might follow the lead of Kennedy, who asked some Bronx residents about the plan and learned that they would rather the city work on homelessness, “dealing with ‘rats the size of cats,’ and cleaning ‘all of the needles on the street.’”
Depending on how much of his agenda he can muscle through, the City that Never Sleeps may be in for a longer or shorter nap when it comes to the growth and vitality of recent decades. Eventually, New York always wakes up and renews itself economically, culturally, and politically. It’s depressing that no one on the political horizon seems likely to conjure the magic that Koch, Giuliani, or Bloomberg—all of whom had terrible flaws—brought, but that’s almost always the case. The most depressing thing is that all of Mamdani’s mistakes are completely avoidable because they’ve happened time and time before. But unlike its old colonial rivals, Boston and Philadelphia, New York has never had much time or use for history.
It’s day 10 of the government shutdown, and the Trump administration is finally starting to make good on its plans to permanently lay off federal workers.
“RIFs have begun,” Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought wrote in a X post on Friday, using the acronym for “reductions for force”—the technical jargon for government layoffs.
The administration has offered no details on the layoffs, beyond the OMB’s comment to Semafor that they will be “substantial.”
Any permanent firings of government workers during a shutdown would also be unusual. Typically, federal workers are temporarily furloughed when Congress fails to agree on appropriations bills to keep the government open, and then given back pay once funding resumes.
In September, as Politico first reported, Vought circulated a memo to government agencies instructing them to prepare more permanent “reduction in force” plans should a shutdown occur.
In the event of a shutdown, agencies were told to eliminate employees working on “programs, projects, or activities” whose funding had lapsed during the shutdown, and which were not “consistent with the President’s priorities.”
Once funding resumes, Vought’s memo instructed agencies to “revise their RIFs as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions.”
In short, the Trump administration is hoping to use the shutdown to permanently reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy, with an immediate focus on eliminating employees who might be working on programs that conflict with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
This is just the latest example of the Trump White House arm-twisting Democrats during the shutdown. Last week, federal departments announced they’d be pausing the release of funds for transportation and energy projects in Democratic states.
Whether the president has the legal power to unilaterally fire employees en masse during the shutdown is controversial.
Vought asserted in his RIF memo that since funding has lapsed for discretionary programs, there’s no statutory requirement that they be carried out. Staff dedicated to those programs can therefore be let go at the executive branch’s discretion.
In a lawsuit filed at the beginning of the shutdown, the major public sector unions rejected this argument. They asserted that a temporary lapse in funding for a program does not mean the legal authorization for the program has lapsed.
Additionally, they argued that since federal law prohibits the executive branch from devoting resources to activities for which there’s no funding, the Trump administration can’t devote resources to firing employees during the shutdown.
In short, this is yet another battle in the constant war Trump and Vought have been fighting with government employees, their union representatives, and liberal litigants more generally, over the extent of the president’s power over executive branch employees.
Vought has consistently asserted that the president has effectively unlimited authority to hire and fire at will. Laws to the contrary are unconstitutional and can more or less be ignored.
His critics argue that Congress has substantial power to shape and regulate the federal bureaucracy, including on matters of personnel, and that creates significant legal limits on the president’s personnel decisions.
Government unions are already preparing to challenge the shutdown layoffs. The AFL-CIO, which already sued over Vought’s initial memo, intimated on X that they’d sue to challenge the actual layoffs as well.
Reducing federal headcount has been one of the few areas where the Trump administration’s government-slashing efforts have produced significant results.
Trump took over a federal bureaucracy numbering some 2.4 million civilian federal employees in January. Between firings, retirements, and the administration’s deferred resignation program, it’s estimated that there are 201,000 fewer federal workers as of September 23.
The layoffs Vought announced Friday would be in addition to that figure.
The Trump administration has said it plans to end the year down some 300,000 employees, which would amount to a 12 percent cut in the federal workforce. Depending on how many workers are let go during the shutdown and whether their firings are allowed to stand, the federal workforce could end up being even smaller still come 2026.
That’d be much to the good. The federal government does too many things. By definition, it employs too many people as well.
A smaller federal workforce equates to a smaller government. Workers who leave non-productive federal employment for productive private sector work enrich the entire economy.
To be sure, there’s only so much firing federal workers can achieve in the pursuit of a leaner state. Reducing federal headcount doesn’t by itself eliminate federal laws, regulations, or programs.
It also has a relatively marginal impact on the cost of government, given that the vast majority of government spending is not going toward civil servants’ pay and benefits.
Still, most shutdowns end with no real change to the size or scope of the federal government. Eventually, appropriations are passed, spending resumes, and government employees go back to work.
This time, if the Trump administration’s shutdown layoffs are allowed to stand, the government that reopens will be smaller than the one that closed down.
Since being reelected, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed his tariffs will reduce the national debt. Trump is now taking this marketing pitch to sell another one of his economic policies: government ownership in private companies.
On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced that the government will be taking a 5 percent stake in Canadian mining firm Lithium Americas and a 5 percent stake in Thacker Pass, the company’s lithium mining project in Nevada. This equity stake builds on a $2.26 billion loan from the Biden administration Energy Department to the company last year to “help finance the construction of facilities for manufacturing lithium carbonate” at Thacker Pass, which has the largest confirmed lithium reserves in North America. The deal, according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, will ensure “better stewardship of American taxpayer dollars.”
The White House has taken this messaging further. “This is a creative solution by the president of the United States to tackle our nation’s crippling debt crisis,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday. “The president is focused on how can the United States government make more money, how can we make our country wealthy and rich again? Cutting some of these unique, creative deals with companies around the world and here at home is just one way that the president is seeking to do that.”
These types of “creative deals” have become a hallmark of the second Trump administration. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the federal government has taken a “golden share” of U.S. Steel, granted export licenses to American chipmakers in exchange for a cut of the revenue generated from their sales, and, more recently, became the largest shareholder of Intel by taking a 10 percent stake in the company (worth about $9 billion at the time of acquisition and $17 billion today).
The deals have been justified as a way to protect America’s economic and national security interests, and the Lithium Americas announcement is no different. “It’s in America’s best interest to get that mine built,” Wright toldBloomberg. “Lithium Americas needs to raise some more capital so the mine is financially sound….We’re leaning in with a large amount of debt capital, so it’s just a more commercial transaction.”
Like the other government stakes before it, the economic justification for this deal is flimsy. At the time of the initial Energy Department loan in 2024, global lithium demand was experiencing unprecedented growth, which has continued and is expected to continue as the use of semiconductors, electric vehicles, and renewable energy sources becomes ubiquitous. With the mine expected to produce 400,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate each year and generate over $2 billion in revenue (according to a January estimate), there is no reason why taxpayers need to finance a project that the market seems to think will be profitable.
The White House’s argument that this will tackle the “crippling debt crisis” could be even flimsier. Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, tells Reason that taking a 5 percent stake in a $2 billion project is a “rounding error for our debt problem.” The national debt currently stands at over $30 trillion held by the public. Lincicome points out that “the only way to get money back is by selling the stake, which [the Energy Department] doesn’t plan on doing.” At the end of the day, he adds, this deal has less to do with addressing the national debt and “everything to do with exercising more control over private businesses.”
The White House has made several questionable claims to justify Trump’s takeover of the economy. Arguing that a government stake in an already federally backed project will shrink the national debt could be its weakest argument yet.
By now, most of us who pay attention to politics have grown accustomed to tuning out the word-salad responses that former President Donald Trump frequently offers when asked a specific, policy-oriented question.
But even by Trump’s standards, the answer he gave on Thursday when asked to explain how he’d propose to lower child care costs was a doozy.
“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about—that, because, look, child care is child care—you know, there’s something you have to have it in this country. You have to have it,” Trump began. “But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us.”
It goes on from there. Read the whole thing here or watch it here.
If you’re being very generous to Trump, you might conclude that he’s proposing to use tariff revenue to cover child care costs—though it’s not clear how much he’d spend or what the mechanism for redistributing that money would be. In short, what it seems Trump is promising here is a huge expansion of taxes on Americans to somehow pay for child care costs: growing government on the revenue side to pay for an expansion of government on the spending side.
Of course, it’s hard to tell exactly what he was saying there, so let’s not get bogged down in the specifics. Trump certainty isn’t.
It may be tempting to simply write this off as “Trump being Trump” and move on. But the Republican presidential nominee’s consistent inattention to the details of policymaking does matter—even if it has no bearing on the election—and the child care issue is a perfect example of why.
This sort of issue is a liability for Trump because he can’t just bluster or pander his way through it. Trump excels when he can turn complex policies into simple, partisan us-vs.-them arguments that allow him to avoid any attention on the specifics. On issues like taxes and immigration, this technique works because one party broadly wants the policy to shift in one direction, so Trump can simply promise to do the opposite—never mind the details.
But no one wants higher child care costs. Both sides want to reduce them. The argument, then, must turn on which side can offer the better plan for accomplishing that goal. As Thursday’s answer makes obvious, Trump has no such plan.
That’s a problem because Vice President Kamala Harris can offer at least the semblance of a plan—and it’s a bad one. Harris has “signaled that she plans to build on the ambitions of outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration, which sought to pour billions in taxpayer dollars into making child care and home care for elderly and disabled adults more affordable,” the Associated Press summarized last month.
Harris has not offered sufficient policy details to say exactly what she supports, but Biden’s plan mostly involved throwing more money at child care providers. In a supplemental budget request last year, for example, Biden asked Congress to approve $16 billion in additional subsidies for child care. Both Biden and Harris also support an expansion of the child tax credit—which many parents would presumably use to pay for rising child care costs.
There are a number of alternatives that a conservative presidential candidate could discuss—even if many of them depend on state and local policymakers. Ease zoning laws to allow more child care facilities to open. Eliminate foolish barriers to entry like occupational licensing laws or requirements that child care providers have college degrees. Loosen rules that require certain staff-to-child ratios. The goal of those proposals is to increase the supply of child care, which is what the country actually needs.
At the very least, a more capable candidate would explain why subsidizing demand—by redistributing more money into parents’ pockets or having taxpayers prop up providers—is a terrible way to reduce costs. Just look at what decades of similar federal subsidies have done to the cost of college! Why would you want to repeat that mistake?
But the Republican Party does not have a candidate capable of or interested in making that argument. And if the Republican presidential candidate can’t articulate supply-side alternatives and a rhetorical counterweight to costly, counterproductive Democratic proposals, then what good is he?
Again, Trump’s inability to discuss child care policy in a serious way may not affect the outcome of the election. Certainly, his lack of policy specifics did not hinder him from winning in 2016.
In the bigger picture, however, this matters. Millions of Americans are worried about soaring child care costs. For the next two months, they will hear lots of bad ideas from Harris’ campaign about how to allegedly fix those problems. Many won’t seek out alternatives, and they will come away from this election cycle with the idea that more subsidies and more spending are the only things that can be done, and the question is which party will be more effective at delivering those things.
As a result, child care costs will continue to rise, the government will get more expensive, and the efforts to solve both those problems will face a steeper climb.
The Biden administration may take redistribution to new extremes if a policy revision floated in December comes to fruition. The White House wants to give federal agencies the right to seize some pharmaceutical patents when they deem drug prices too high.
President Joe Biden claims authority to act under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which lets nonprofits and small businesses retain ownership of inventions made possible by federal contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements—so long as they patent and license these inventions. Its impetus was all the innovation languishing under government ownership.
“In 1980, the federal government had approximately 30,000 patents, of which only 5% led to new or improved products,” according to the Syracuse University Office of Technology Transfer. The government simply didn’t “have the resources to develop and market the inventions.”
Under the Bayh-Dole system, it’s easier for inventions (including pharmaceuticals) to get from the research stage to the market stage. Since the point of the law is to let the public benefit from innovation, it contains a stipulation saying the government can take ownership of an invention if an institution doesn’t commercialize it.
This stipulation, known as “march-in rights,” was designed as a safeguard against the system being abused by companies who might purchase licenses solely to keep competitors from using new technology. The government has never actually exercised march-in rights before. But they can apply if a patent holder doesn’t commercialize an invention in a timely manner or tries to license it on unreasonable terms, among a few other reasons. Notably, these reasons do not include “the White House thinks it’s priced too high.”
“The purpose of our act was to spur the interaction between public and private research so that patients would receive the benefits of innovative science sooner,” wrote former Sens. Birch Bayh (D–Ind.) and Bob Dole (R–Kan.), in a 2002 Washington Post op-ed. They noted that even when early-stage research was government-funded, the financial and temporal input required from private industry was still substantial. “Bayh-Dole did not intend that government set prices on resulting products” or be able to revoke a license “contingent on the pricing of a resulting product.”
Now the Biden administration wants to allow use of the law in a way its creators explicitly stated it was not intended to be used. “When drug companies won’t sell taxpayer-funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House economic adviser Lael Brainard told reporters in December.
To this effect, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Commerce have proposed a new framework that allows price to be a factor in determining whether to exercise march-in rights. If enacted, it would effectively give the government control over the price of drugs.
Javier Milei campaigned with a chainsaw, promising to cut the size of government.
Argentina’s leftists had so clogged the country’s economic arteries with regulations that what once was one of the world’s richest countries is now one of the poorest.
Inflation is more than 200 percent.
People save their whole lives—and then find their savings worth nearly nothing.
Milei understands that government can’t create wealth.
He surprised diplomats at the World Economic Forum this month by saying, “The state is the problem!”
He spoke up for capitalism: “Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state…. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution.”
Go, Milei! I wish current American politicians talked that way.
In the West, young people turn socialist. In Argentina, they live under socialist policies. They voted for Milei.
Sixty-nine percent of voters under 25 voted for him. That helped him win by a whopping 3 million votes.
He won promising to reverse “decades of decadence.” He told the Economic Forum, “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”
Right.
Poor countries demonstrate that again and again.
The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him.
But already, “He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls,” says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already “eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen.”
“He can just do that without Congress?” I ask.
“The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States.”
Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly.
“Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!” says Di Martino.
He scrapped laws that say, “Buy in Argentina.” I point out that America has “Buy America” rules.
“It only makes poor people poorer because it increases costs!” Di Martino replies, “Why shouldn’t Argentinians be able to buy Brazilian pencils or Chilean grapes?”
“To support Argentina,” I push back.
“Guess what?” Says Di Martino, “Not every country is able to produce everything at the lowest cost. Imagine if you had to produce bananas in America.”
Argentina’s leftist governments tried to control pretty much everything.
“The regulations were such that everything not explicitly legal was illegal,” laughs Di Martino. “Now…everything not illegal is legal.”
One government agency Milei demoted was a “Department for Women, Gender and Diversity.” DiMartino says that reminds him of Venezuela’s Vice Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness. “These agencies exist just so government officials can hire their cronies.”
Cutting government jobs and subsidies for interest groups is risky for vote-seeking politicians. There are often riots in countries when politicians cut subsidies. Sometimes politicians get voted out. Or jailed.
“What’s incredible about Milei,” notes Di Martino, “is that he was able to win on the promise of cutting subsidies.”
That is remarkable. Why would Argentinians vote for cuts?
“Argentinians are fed up with the status quo,” replies Di Martino.
Milei is an economist. He named his dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, all libertarian economists.
I point out that most Americans don’t know who those men were.
“The fact that he’s naming his dogs after these famous economists,” replies Di Martino, “shows that he’s really a nerd. It’s a good thing to have an economics nerd president of a country.”
“What can Americans learn from Argentina?”
“Keep America prosperous. So we never are in the spot of Argentina in the first place. That requires free markets.”
Yes.
Actually, free markets plus rule of law. When people have those things, prosperity happens.
In summer 2023, American progressivism was spending big and riding high. Despite razor-thin majorities in Congress, Democrats had spent the last two years enacting hundreds of billions of dollars in new subsidies—for green energy, public transportation, domestic manufacturing, scientific research, and more. This progressive pork was now in the hands of Democratic President Joe Biden to distribute as his administration saw fit.
Yet when California Gov. Gavin Newsom looked upon the piles of fresh federal cash, all he could do was despair.
“We’re going to lose billions and billions of dollars in the status quo,” he complained to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in June. “The beneficiaries of a lot of these dollars are red states that don’t give a damn about these issues, and they’re getting the projects.”
Newsom was right about the distribution of the funds: More than 80 percent of the new federal funding for clean energy and semiconductors was headed for GOP districts, according to the Financial Times. His outburst spoke to the anxiety of much of liberal America.
Despite a string of progressive policy victories at the federal level, a Democratic Party under the grip of progressives, and ironclad Democratic control over some of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities and states, blue America just wasn’t delivering what its boosters said the country needed.
“We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper,” Klein himself had written a few weeks before his Newsom interview was published. Yet “in New York or California or Oregon…it is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak—perhaps especially where they are weak.”
The blue strongholds’ failure to build had added countervailing losses to all their wins.
These states aren’t just losing federal grants. They’re losing residents to states where housing construction is easier. They’re losing companies to places where the regulatory burden is lighter. They’re losing voters, tax dollars, congressional seats, and more to places that build the things people want. If the trend keeps up, the progressive vision for America may be lost as well.
This threat has provoked some surprising self-reflection from liberal wonks, writers, and officials.
America, and particularly blue America, has consciously wrapped itself in red tape, regulations, and special-interest carve-outs, to the point that it has become nearly impossible to convert either government subsidies or private capital into needed physical things.
As Newsom said to Klein, “We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.”
A hodgepodge coalition of legacy publication columnists, traditional think-tankers, upstart Substack writers, and obsessive Twitter posters have rallied around the straightforward idea that what the country needs is more stuff, and it isn’t going to get it with that thicket of rules standing in the way. Their call to action is what Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls the “abundance agenda.”
According to Thompson, America has produced a lot of technology that allows people to complain about problems, but not much in the physical world to actually solve those problems.
Our “age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress,” he wrote last year. “Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing.” Thompson’s complaint echoes entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s famous 2013 quip that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” What we need instead, argues Thompson, are policies that will kick-start material growth and technological development here in reality.
For libertarians and free marketers, this new abundance agenda has a lot to offer. Many of its intellectual forefathers and policy foot soldiers are themselves libertarian-leaning. Even when they’re not, the abundance agenda remains a directionally deregulatory affair. Once seemingly fringe libertarian hobbyhorses such as abolishing zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration restrictions are now being aired prominently in mainstream center-left and progressive spaces.
At the same time, most of those who favor the abundance agenda are either agnostic about big government or actively supportive of it. In its most statist iterations, the deregulatory elements of the abundance agenda are mostly about clearing away the bureaucratic and constitutional obstacles to government-provided services and government-sponsored megaprojects.
For some abundance-agenda adherents, it’s a partisan project as well: The goal is to make blue America more efficient, more effective, and more appealing in the service of making America more Democratic.
And yet: The fundamental policy goal of abundance agenda liberalism is to clear away bureaucratic and political obstacles to useful projects, especially in the housing market. Is this a devil’s bargain that libertarians should be willing to make?
Getting the Public Out of Public Policy
Discussions about the abundance agenda quickly get bogged down in wonky specifics. But its pursuit of limitless individual potential powered by limitless growth and energy is nothing short of utopian.
In a 2022 essay for Works in Progress, Benjamin Reinhardt described this futuristic end point through the eyes of someone living in a world of abundant energy “too cheap to meter.”
You would wake up on your artificial island off the coast of South America, commute to work via a flying car and Singaporean space elevator, put in a few hours working on new longevity drugs in zero-gravity, and then jet off to Tokyo for a quick dinner with friends before commuting home.
As you return home, Reinhardt writes, you hope that one day you have “the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better.”
In order to achieve this sci-fi world of abundance, we have to unshackle ourselves from growth-phobic institutions riddled with “veto points” stopping new housing, energy, and more.
The American government of today is a highly participatory one. Individual people have substantial opportunity to have their say in public hearings and courtrooms on everything from new housing projects to new power plants.
It wasn’t always this way.
As recounted in Yale historian Paul Sabin’s book Public Citizens, this level of citizen input was the product of laws passed in the 1970s inspired by slow-growth activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader.
This group of writers, lawyers, and activists argued that the midcentury liberal era’s love of growth and bigness had left corporations free to pollute the environment and flood the market with dangerous products. Meanwhile, unchecked, opaque government bureaucracies built or approved harmful megaprojects that bulldozed private property, often without the owners’ consent, and devastated nature in the name of “progress.”
To hold fundamentally untrustworthy bureaucracies accountable, citizens were empowered to sue bureaucrats when they didn’t follow new environmental regulations or disclose enough information about the projects they approved.
The thinking at the time, writes Sabin, was that “aggressive litigation might make the government work better.”
These anti-growth, anti-bigness policies also drifted down to the state and local level. Throughout the 1970s, state legislatures passed their own, often much more expansive environmental reporting laws that allowed citizens to sue to stop private projects such as new housing and businesses, as well as major infrastructure projects.
Local governments, meanwhile, tightened existing zoning codes to drastically reduce the amount of housing that could be built. They also gave local residents (via public hearings, referendums, and discretionary approval processes) more say over the approval of housing that was still technically allowed.
Empowered to sue over projects they didn’t like, local “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) activists grew increasingly successful in stopping everything that smacked of progress in their neighborhoods.
Free marketers have been critical of these laws from day one.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which has enabled citizens to challenge the approval of both large infrastructure projects and single-family homes, was enacted in 1970.
By 1979, Reason was accusing the law of having “done more damage to home building in that state than anything since the last ice age and the San Andreas Fault.” It took several decades for mainstream Democrats like Newsom to start making similar complaints.
Indeed, these laws initially sparked little pushback from liberals. But as their costs have continued to mount in terms of housing units not built and energy not generated, a growing chorus of progressive voices has started demanding reform.
One example is the rise of California’s rabidly pro-development “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) coalition in the mid-2010s. Irritated by ever-rising housing costs, the new YIMBYs started to demand that restrictive zoning laws and procedures that gave neighbors the ability to say “no” to new housing be abolished.
These largely left-wing YIMBYs were fighting for property rights and freer markets in building. Yet their rhetoric is more likely to stress left-wing notions of equality and inclusion: The privileged few shouldn’t get to say “no” to housing for the hard-pressed many.
Zoning reform has since become a core of the abundance agenda. Its critique of citizen veto points over housing has quickly spread to other areas of the regulatory state.
When it comes to the approval of infrastructure projects, community input is “fundamentally flawed,” wrote Jerusalem Demsas for The Atlantic last year. “It’s biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don’t want to allow projects that are broadly useful.”
Riddling the system with these “veto points” has also given rise to a related criticism of modern American governance: what the Times‘ Klein calls “everything bagel liberalism.” (That’s a reference to the all-consuming “everything bagel” from the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once that sucks up so much of the universe that no individual thing ends up mattering.)
The policy implications of the metaphor are clear. If everyone can say “no” to your project, then everyone is going to demand something before they say “yes” to it. That in turn weighs down projects, public or private, with prohibitively costly carve-outs and payoffs.
The abundance agenda’s criticisms of excessive veto points and the special-interest carve-outs they breed has made its supporters more friendly to the libertarian view that market incumbents often convert regulation into a protection racket.
In addition to NIMBY housing regulations, abundance agenda supporters criticize occupational licensing laws for propping up the earnings of incumbent day care workers and hair stylists at the expense of consumers and excluded workers. They criticize immigration restrictions that keep out high-skilled foreigners to protect the wages of native-born Americans. They attack “Buy American” laws that force businesses to purchase domestically sourced materials.
“I think a lot of people don’t know how much the government does to restrict access to a lot of kinds of goods that we don’t have serious disagreements about whether people should have access to them,” says liberal pundit Matt Yglesias. “There’s a lot of pretty pure rent seeking in the system.”
On the flip side, the growing popularity of the abundance agenda has seen free marketers use that framing to pitch their longstanding deregulatory beliefs to a wider left-of-center audience that might otherwise tune them out.
Discourse, a publication of the pro-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University, has published a series of essays on the abundance agenda, most of which argue that a long list of free market policies are necessary for true abundance.
Both libertarian and progressive abundance-agenda supporters have reached back in history to find forgotten strands of liberalism that prioritized growth and progress.
An Abundance of Takes
In Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Anathem, there exists an order of rationalist monks whose whole purpose is to explain that every supposedly new idea was actually discussed to death centuries ago. If these monks existed in our universe, they’d likely say that, actually, there’s nothing all that novel about a progressivism that extols the virtues of growing the private sector and government.
As recently as the mid-2000s, there was a boom in this kind of thinking. Writers like Brink Lindsey (then a vice president of the Cato Institute) and Gene Sperling (one of President Bill Clinton’s economic advisers) made their respective cases for a “liberaltarian” or “pro-growth progressive” coalition.
The liberal-libertarian fusionists saw dynamic markets as necessary for the good jobs and tax revenue progressives wanted. They also recognized redistribution as a just and politically necessary means of shoring up popular support for the economic dynamism the libertarians prized.
As a bonus, a growing economy would convert everyday people to socially liberal values, or at least make them less willing to go in for reactionary politics. “It is easier to have a melting pot if it is a growing pot,” Sperling wrote in his 2005 book The Pro-Growth Progressive.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot that distinguishes today’s abundance agenda from the pro-growth progressives of old. The most obvious one is the contemporary group’s means of communication and organization. Notwithstanding Thompson’s admonition about too much venting and not enough inventing, the abundance agenda is definitely “too online.”
Today’s abundance-agenda liberals own a lot of real estate at legacy media outlets: Klein writes a column at The New York Times, while Thompson and Demsas write for The Atlantic. More often than not, the prestige publications’ version of the abundance agenda is a filtered, polished rendition of broad ideas and specific policies first circulated on social media and in digital newsletters.
Where else but #EconTwitter would thousands of professional wonks and interested laypeople gather to chew the fat about the latest National Bureau of Economic Research working paper explaining low growth rates, or dunk on clips of anti-housing activists saying a new apartment building will ruin their neighborhood?
Where else but in subscriber-supported Substack newsletters could writers find it possible (and profitable) to pen thousands of words on the particulars of energy-permitting regulations or international variation in public transportation project costs?
Out of this wonky internet churn, individual failures to build get synthesized into a coherent group identity around an abundance agenda and its larger call to action.
A representative episode was the uproar over La Sombrita.
La Sombrita was Los Angeles’ “radical” new design for shading its bus stops that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mostly useless piece of metal that cast almost no shade.
Its primary virtue was that it was so small and ineffective that city workers could just go out and hang them from bus stop signs. More substantial shade structures would need multiple sign-offs and approvals from L.A.’s sprawling city bureaucracy.
A quarter-century ago, this small-scale boondoggle might have attracted little notice. Instead, it quickly went viral in the abundance-agenda corners of Twitter, which then produced thinkier Substack pieces about how La Sombrita explained America’s material stagnation, which were then followed by coverage in major traditional news outlets.
No “failure to build,” no matter how small, would escape the movement’s all-seeing eye.
Yglesias, who writes the Slow Boring newsletter on Substack, argues that the online nature of abundance-agenda liberalism has helped rehabilitate market-friendly centrist “New Democratic” thinking from its low ebb in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
That kind of proto–abundance agenda “had a lot of purchase and a lot of institutional backing 20 years ago and then came to be discredited because the particular institutions associated with New Democrats came to be associated with the invasion of Iraq” and the Great Recession, he says.
Thanks to new voices and institutions online, he adds, “there’s been a rebuilding and rediscovery of what was correct in that political tendency.”
As a sign of its success, the online movement has started to spawn traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in the real world.
One can see this in the rise of an abundance-agenda-adjacent think tank, the Center for New Liberalism (CNL)—previously known as the Neoliberal Project, and before that r/neoliberal. (In its earliest forms in the mid-2010s, CNL was just a humble subreddit, or online forum.)
“It was making really wonky memes about the federal funds rate,” says CNL co-founder Colin Mortimer. “It very quickly turned into a community and refuge for non-Bernie [as in socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders] Democrats who wanted a place to talk about still wonky but general politics.”
That subreddit community followed the upward ape-to-man trajectory of any successful internet-spawned political movement, growing into a successful Twitter account, a podcast, a website, local in-person meetups, and eventually acquisition by a decadesold center-left think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, in 2020.
The CNL has since spun off into its own independent organization, where a large part of its mission continues to be convincing center-left policy makers that “we just don’t have enough stuff” and “we should make it easier to replace that stuff or build new stuff.”
That’s not the only abundance-agenda institution to grow beyond the confines of simple posting.
For a time, billionaire Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison was content to write about the causes of and obstacles to economic growth on his personal blog. His company has since plowed significant resources into more traditional publishing endeavors to expand on those ideas.
It has launched Stripe Press, which publishes and reprints a number of books helping to lay an intellectual groundwork for growth-obsessed abundance agenda-ers. That includes J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car?, which pins our stagnation on regulations that crushed energy production, and Stubborn Attachments, by George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, which argues we have a moral duty to future human beings to increase economic growth by as much as possible.
The abundance agenda and libertarianism have a significant natural overlap. Nevertheless, the former’s goals are higher growth and “more stuff” generally, not a smaller state.
That goal has created an odd-bedfellows coalition of big-government liberals and small-government libertarians and conservatives, all interested in some pruning of the regulatory state. But the progressive members of this coalition want that pruning to unleash the best big government has to offer.
If free markets or small government institutions are seen as an impediment to higher growth and empowered, competent government, then they too have to go.
Klein’s “everything bagel liberalism” is a useful framing for discussing the problems of excessive process and special interest carve-outs. He first deployed it in the context of all the cost-increasing regulations attached to affordable housing development in San Francisco. The development he profiled managed to escape a lot of these regulations by relying exclusively on private money.
Nevertheless, Klein’s column made it clear he wanted the government to play a significant role in solving the state’s affordable housing problems, and indeed, its problems generally.
“Government needs to be able to solve big problems. But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice, and it’s one that California keeps making,” he wrote. That’s a far cry from the libertarian view that government will inherently get bogged down with needless process and/or get captured by special interests.
Even where liberal adherents of the abundance agenda support getting rid of government regulation on market actors, it’s often part of a larger political project of making progressive policies work and progressive-dominated regions more powerful.
The abundance agenda in many ways started as an effort to liberalize zoning regulations on new housing construction in expensive coastal metro areas. A large part of that was early YIMBY activists and writers correctly understanding that restrictions on market supply are driving up market prices.
At the same time, this focus on zoning speaks to a progressive anxiety that blue America is losing people, power, and influence to places where housing costs are cheaper.
“The population center of gravity keeps shifting to places where they let houses get built is something everyone understands. The political economy consequences of that are dire,” says Yglesias. “Do you want to concede that the overall model in Texas is just better or do you want to zero in on how much of that excess growth is caused by housing elements and then do something about it?”
The libertarian political project is to shrink the state generally, not just reduce permitting times for federally approved infrastructure projects.
Many activists and policy wonks who support the abundance agenda argue it’s often undesirable and certainly a waste of time for anyone to pursue those larger changes to the nation’s political economy.
That’s the view taken by Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress. Stapp got his start working on the big questions of tech policy, such as antitrust and privacy regulations.
“It’s trench warfare,” he says. “Both sides are really well-funded. They’ve been having these arguments for decades. Has legislation been passed? Have rules and regulations changed? Not really.”
Stapp launched his institute with the goal of sidestepping those bigger policy fights in favor of focusing on the “inputs to innovations,” such as high-skilled immigration and federal science funding.
“Lots of people talking about should we give [the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation] more billions of dollars or take away their funding,” says Stapp. Instead, his group asks: “For any given budget, whether it’s a little smaller or a little bigger, how are they spending it?”
That could well be the best way to be an effective policy entrepreneur. But it requires one to make peace with a state far larger and more intrusive than any libertarian could be comfortable with.
Even some abundance-agenda adherents who share the goal of freer markets and a less intrusive state have nevertheless embraced the idea that the modern world requires us to have a better functioning government before we can have a smaller government.
“Our governments cannot address climate change, much [less] improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality,” wrote Cowen in a 2020 blog post advocating “state-capacity libertarianism.”
“Those problems require state capacity—albeit to boost markets—in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with,” he continued. “Even if you favor education privatization, in the shorter run we still need to make the current system much better. That would even make privatization easier, if that is your goal.”
Old-school libertarians have criticized this notion. David R. Henderson of the Hoover Institution perceptively replied to Cowen that “the latent power that a large-capacity state would have could more easily be drawn on than the power that a small-capacity state would have.”
“Even if large-capacity libertarians wouldn’t want the state to throw people in prison for producing, distributing, or using drugs,” Henderson warns, “they might not get their wish.”
The Liberaltarian Moment?
The liberaltarian movement never quite panned out. Will the abundance agenda be a similar flop? It’s always tough to read the tea leaves, but there’s reason to think a “liberalism that builds” might be a stickier concept.
The pandemic era’s trifecta of huge spending, high inflation, and empty shelves has reinforced the notion that you can’t just spend your way out of material deprivation. Center-left policy wonks and lay policy enthusiasts are increasingly hungry for ideas about how to grow the pie, not just subsidize and redistribute it.
Pandemic-era migration from blue to red America has made clear the role liberal states’ homebuilding regulations are playing in pricing people out. That has helped keep liberalizing zoning reforms on the top of the agenda at the state and local level.
Lastly, the success of congressional Democrats and the Biden administration at squeezing through big spending bills has, ironically, removed one source of friction between the big- and small-government sides of the abundance agenda. Like it or not, those billions in subsidies have already been approved. That’s one less point to argue about.
Provided it does stick around, where will an abundance agenda lead us?
One optimistic view is that an abundance agenda will succeed in smashing the veto point–riddled institutions of the 1970s. The inherent inefficiencies of government will mean that its schemes will still flounder, while private capital is at last unshackled to build our housing- and energy-rich future.
Or perhaps Henderson’s pessimism is on point. Abundance-agenda liberals (and a few useful-idiot libertarians) will succeed in making a more effective state only to see it slide its interfering tentacles into more and more areas of the economy and individuals’ lives.
Maybe the abundance agenda will be truly transcendent, as in Reinhardt’s energy-rich utopia. With the problems of material scarcity basically solved, questions about government control versus private initiative will become hopelessly archaic. Taxation will still be theft, of course. But when energy is too cheap to meter, who’ll even notice the state pirating a few electrons?
Most likely, we’ll end up somewhere in the middle, with the abundance agenda adding another pro-growth, deregulatory spice to the “everything bagel” of Democratic governance. Regulations will become less burdensome, but they won’t disappear. Progressive politicians will have to be more mindful of the costs of permitting procedures and “Buy American” rules, but they won’t get rid of them entirely.
That seems to be the direction where Newsom’s California is headed. After complaining bitterly about CEQA, the governor unveiled some incredibly mild tweaks to the law. They weren’t earth-shattering stuff by any means, and they won’t fix the state’s failures to build.
But directionally, they’re deregulatory. Perhaps real abundance starts on the margins.
