Democrats have a problem that runs deeper than the 2024 election. They have a problem that runs deeper than Elon Musk’s assault on the government. Look at the places they govern: strongholds like New York and Illinois and where I’m from, California. They’re losing people. [CLIP: Since the pandemic started, California is seeing an exodus, a mass exodus.] In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents. In New York, 179,000. [CLIP: New York City is losing some folks, some residents. But it turns out that New York State is also seeing the population drop.] [CLIP: And in Illinois, the Illinois residents have been fleeing the state at an alarming rate. The state’s population has been in decline for the 10th year in a row. Why are all these people leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this: The cost of living is too high. It is too expensive to get child care. It’s almost like paying another mortgage. It is too expensive to buy a home. [CLIP: It’s very unrealistic to be able to put a down payment on a $2 million home with two kids surviving.] You end up having to live too far from your work. And so they’re going to places where all of that is cheaper. [CLIP: Every day someone is moving to the Florida area.] [CLIP: She got an apartment three times the size of the one she had in Manhattan. Plus, there’s a wraparound deck.] [CLIP: Yeah, I can definitely understand that. Four bedroom, three bath house I had in Texas.] Yeah, I know these families. These families are my friends. I’ve lived with them in these places, and I’ve watched many of them move away from the place they love, the city they wanted to raise their children because they could not afford to live there. You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live. You are not the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live. In the American political system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the electoral college sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024 will lose house seats and electoral college votes. The states that Trump won will gain them. So in that electoral college, a Democrat could win every single state. Harris won in 2024 and also win Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and still lose the presidency. There is a policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn’t work, and a right that wants to destroy government even when it is working. What we need is a political party that actually makes government work. Democrats can be that party. They should be that party. But it requires them to confront what they have done to make government fail. I could tell you a dozen stories in my new book, I do. But let me tell you here just one. In 1982, more than 40 years ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would it take to build a high speed rail system across the state. [CLIP: Make a choice. Change the chemistry of the country.] He liked what he saw, and so did California’s voters. In 1996, California formed a high speed rail authority to plan for construction. High speed rail is not some futuristic technology like nuclear fusion or flying cars. Japan broke ground on high speed rail back in 1959. You can ride on these trains elsewhere. I have ridden on these trains. So in 2008, California’s voters approved Prop 1A, which set aside $10 billion to begin construction on a high speed rail line that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. It would run through the Central Valley. It would get there in under two hours and 40 minutes. And it would cost, they thought, $33.6 billion. California’s High-Speed Rail Authority estimated we’d be able to ride that train by the year 2020. And the news kept getting better for high speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. That had hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure of the future, and high-speed rail in particular, had captured Obama’s imagination. [CLIP: Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal. No delays. No sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Now, all of this is not some fanciful pie in the sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is, it’s been happening elsewhere. Not here.] Obama wanted it to happen here. In California, where the voters had already begun planning and funding high-speed rail, was the obvious place. And the political stars just kept aligning. High speed rail is foremost champion returned — [CLIP: And the most expensive campaign in California history.] — when Jerry Brown won back the governor’s mansion almost 30 years after leaving it. [CLIP: Now, 30 years later, within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out.] But it didn’t happen. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be rideable by 2020. And the cost estimate, it wasn’t $33 billion anymore. It had risen and risen and risen. By 2018, it was $76 billion. [CLIP: Let’s — Let’s level about the high speed rail.] The next year, 2019, Gavin Newsom, who had served as Brown’s lieutenant governor, succeeded him as governor. [CLIP: Now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were. However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield] Merced and Bakersfield, a line no one would have authorized. If it had been the plan that was presented in the first place. The latest estimate just for that line is $35 billion, as much as the entire L.A. to S.F. line was estimated to cost in 2008. And even this Merced and Bakersfield line, it’s not predicted to begin carrying passengers until sometime between 2030 and 2033 — if all goes well. I’m told now that finishing the L.A. to San Francisco line will cost $110 billion at least. California doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of funding for high speed rail, so they’re building what they can right now with no idea of how they’re ever going to finish. What went so wrong here? In October 2023, I went to Fresno, California. And what I heard as I walked that track with the engineers who have built it and the people overseeing it — it wasn’t engineering problems, it was political problems. There are parts of the high-speed rail line that intersect with freight rail lines, but the freight rail lines are so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas, construction just stops for months, every year. Why did the authority begin construction in the Central Valley, rather than near the megacities? Well, one reason was that when California applied for federal money, the Obama administration wanted bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered, it wasn’t really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific communities. The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there. And so did the initial construction. But that made it less likely. High speed rail would generate the ridership, the political support or the financial backing to ever actually finish. And that, of course, is bad for air pollution in Fresno and across the state. Trains are cleaner than cars, but high speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner. The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024, 12 years later, it still wasn’t done. What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. [CLIP: Good morning all. Welcome to the California High-Speed Rail finance and audit committee meeting.] It’s process. It’s negotiating. [CLIP: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to go over some important information for members of the public.] [CLIP: Speakers will be called upon in the order that their hands are raised.] [CLIP: Good morning. Elmer Lizardi here, on behalf of the California Labor Federation] [CLIP: The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.] [CLIP: My question is, why do we have to wait almost a whole year later to find out that they’re not in compliance?] Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with home owners, with farm owners, with other parts of the government. Those negotiations cost time, which cost money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the design or the construction. And that costs money and that costs time. Those negotiations are the product of decades of liberal policies meant to protect against government abuses. And they may do that, but they also prevent government from building quickly or affordably. In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. The Chinese government doesn’t spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. Its power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains. And look, I don’t want America to become China, but I do want it to be able to build trains. As China can, as Europe can, as Japan can. [CLIP: The train doors are closing. Step all the way in.] The Second Avenue subway project in New York City — [CLIP: This is the first major expansion of the New York City subway in more than 50 years.] — it was the most expensive subway project by kilometer the world has ever seen. Has New York dramatically reformed its policies to make the next one easier and cheaper? [CLIP: Ladies and gentlemen, next stop, 125th Street.] [CLIP: That comes with a $6.3 billion price tag, far more than phase one.] No, of course it hasn’t. [CLIP: Do you remember the Big Dig? What is the Big Dig? The Big Dig.] [CLIP: It’s pretty hard to ignore the Big Dig. It is everywhere.] Did the decades of delay and the billions of cost overruns on Boston’s Big Dig change how Massachusetts builds? Not really. California. California has the worst housing problem in the country. In 2022, the state had 12 percent of the country’s population. It had 30 percent of the country’s homeless population, and it had percent — 5-0 — of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this unfathomable failure led to California building more homes than it was building a decade ago? No. It hasn’t. In the last few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that forces government to work. This is an awkward time to make this argument. Elon Musk and DOGE are trying to raze the federal government to the ground. Musk has been a loud critic of California’s high-speed rail project, calling it a fraud, saying we should just let him build his imaginary Hyperloop instead. But in reality, he’s never offered a plan that would work to build anything better or cheaper than high-speed rail. His alternative, in truth, is nothing. And I refuse to accept that this is our choice. A Democratic Party that will not make government work, and a Republican Party that wants to make government fail. What those two parties have created over decades is scarcity. Scarcity of homes, of good infrastructure, of clean energy, of public goods. But the difference between them is that the populist right loves scarcity. It is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. Look, Donald Trump could have run on more. He could have run on bringing Texas’s housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there is no zoning code, so building is easy, and the average home sells for a bit over $300,000. Compare that to Los Angeles, where the average home now sells for over $1 million. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel they use against immigrants. [CLIP: 25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country.] [CLIP: As just one example, a vivid one, look at the explosion in rent in Springfield, Ohio, where Kamala has resettled the 20,000 Haitians] Trump could have run on the success of Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the Covid vaccines. Instead, he’s slashing government funding for science and medical research, and firing scientists. He could have run on making it easier to build energy of all kinds in America. Instead, he’s trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and to trade them with the world. Instead, he’s trying to cut international trade, imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Elon Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla — companies that are built on federal subsidies. But he’s slashing what government can do, rather than reimagining what it can do. The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance. A politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t give you the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Government is not simply good at all times. It is not simply bad at all times. Sometimes government has to get out of the way — like in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, like in creating markets or organizing resources for technologies that do not yet exist and that we need and that are too risky for markets to fund. There is going to be pressure over these next few years, as Elon Musk and Donald Trump dismantle the federal government to see only the sins of the MAGA right. And don’t get me wrong, the MAGA right is dangerous. A resistance is needed. But so too is an alternative. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promises of strongmen, they need to offer them the fruits of effective government. But if Democrats are to become the party of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. Liberals spent a generation working at every level of government in society to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. Then they explained away governments failures. They excuse their own selfishness, putting out yard signs saying “No human being is illegal,” “Kindness is everything,” even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of the cities they ran. To unmake this machine will be painful, but it’s necessary. If liberals don’t make government work, zealots like Elon Musk are going to come in and burn it down.
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