Abundance Agenda revisited

Right now the energy among activists is with the left - DSA, Sanders, AOC, etc but I think the country has actually shifted right and is more moderate. Harris outperformed Sanders in Vermont.

I think some of that rightward shift is the perception that Democrats are more focused on social issues and less on economic issues. 

The pollster / economist Josh Doss has been saying for a long time that voters, especially younger voters, define the economy differently. Housing is the most significant. He did in depth videos about why the economy was technically booming if you look at GDP and other indicators but polling was showing that large majorities thought we were in a recession. Wages, although up from several years ago, didn’t keep pace with higher costs and housing costs. I’m predicting that the rising cost of electricity service is going to become more of a factor especially with so many foreign companies and cross border production issues. I get my heating oil and electricity from Canada.

We have to figure out how to fast track the implementation of the infrastructure and other stimulus bills we pass so people experience the benefits and associate them with us.

The example Klein uses is Shapiro getting the highway rebuilt in record time. That has to become the norm and not an extraordinary occurrence.

I think we are all going to have to get comfortable with the personalities and ideas that are part of our coalition. I think AOC is a great communicator even as she hasn’t been a great legislator in terms of bills passed. I’ve never been a fan of Sanders for more personality and process reasons but I support whoever has the courage to step forward at this point. We are going to have to let go of a lot of old conflicts.

While partisans may argue about whether we need more government (liberals) or less government (conservatives), Klein and Thompson stake their ground on the need for better government. Promising truly effective government, they believe, will strengthen a liberalism that has accepted dangerous levels of dysfunction in day-to-day operations, which has made it difficult for fellow Americans to see why market-based solutions are not superior.

Decades of public policies that liberals enacted in the 1950s and 1960s, Klein and Thompson observe, saddled government with multiple layers of regulations, rules, mandates, and paperwork, all of which have since made it nearly impossible to accomplish key objectives. As demand has increased for many social goods, such as reasonably priced homes, clean energy, education, and medicine, the government has failed to supply. Liberals keep throwing money at the problem, but the authors believe that the money is not being well spent. As a result, we have a supply crisis that raises prices because we don’t have enough of what we need: “The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little, and we are too often paralyzed by process.”