Democrats have an issue that runs deeper than the 2024 election. They’ve an issue that runs deeper than Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government. Take a look at the locations they govern: strongholds like New York and Illinois and the place I’m from, California. They’re shedding individuals. [CLIP: Since the pandemic started, California is seeing an exodus, a mass exodus.] In 2023, California noticed a internet lack 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 find yourself having to stay too far out of your work. And they also’re going to locations the place all of that’s 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 do know these households. These households are my mates. I’ve lived with them in these locations, and I’ve watched a lot of them transfer away from the place they love, the town they needed to boost their kids as a result of they may not afford to stay there. You can’t be the celebration of working households when the locations you govern are locations working households can’t afford to stay. You aren’t the celebration of working households when the locations you govern are locations working households can’t afford to stay. Within the American political system, to lose individuals is to lose energy. If these tendencies maintain, the 2030 census will shift the electoral school sharply to the appropriate. The states that Kamala Harris gained in 2024 will lose home seats and electoral school votes. The states that Trump gained will achieve them. So in that electoral school, a Democrat might win each single state. Harris gained in 2024 and in addition win Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and nonetheless lose the presidency. There’s a coverage failure haunting blue states. It has turn out to be too exhausting to construct and too costly to stay within the locations the place Democrats govern. Our politics is break up proper now between a left that defends authorities even when it doesn’t work, and a proper that wishes to destroy authorities even when it’s working. What we want is a political celebration that really makes authorities work. Democrats may be that celebration. They need to be that celebration. But it surely requires them to confront what they’ve accomplished to make authorities fail. I might inform you a dozen tales in my new e book, I do. However let me inform you right here only one. In 1982, greater than 40 years in the past, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a invoice to review what it might it take to construct a excessive velocity rail system throughout the state. [CLIP: Make a choice. Change the chemistry of the country.] He preferred what he noticed, and so did California’s voters. In 1996, California fashioned a excessive velocity rail authority to plan for building. Excessive velocity rail just isn’t some futuristic know-how like nuclear fusion or flying vehicles. Japan broke floor on excessive velocity rail again in 1959. You’ll be able to journey on these trains elsewhere. I’ve ridden on these trains. So in 2008, California’s voters accepted Prop 1A, which put aside $10 billion to start building on a excessive velocity rail line that will join Los Angeles and San Francisco. It will run via the Central Valley. It will get there in underneath two hours and 40 minutes. And it might price, they thought, $33.6 billion. California’s Excessive-Pace Rail Authority estimated we’d have the ability to journey that prepare by the yr 2020. And the information saved getting higher for top velocity rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Restoration and Reinvestment Act into legislation. That had lots of of billions of {dollars} to construct the infrastructure of the long run, and high-speed rail particularly, had captured Obama’s creativeness. [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 needed it to occur right here. In California, the place the voters had already begun planning and funding high-speed rail, was the plain place. And the political stars simply saved aligning. Excessive velocity rail is foremost champion returned — [CLIP: And the most expensive campaign in California history.] — when Jerry Brown gained again the governor’s mansion nearly 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 surely didn’t occur. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be rideable by 2020. And the associated fee 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 following yr, 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 nobody would have approved. If it had been the plan that was offered within the first place. The newest estimate only for that line is $35 billion, as a lot as the whole L.A. to S.F. line was estimated to price in 2008. And even this Merced and Bakersfield line, it’s not predicted to start carrying passengers till someday between 2030 and 2033 — if all goes nicely. I’m instructed now that ending the L.A. to San Francisco line will price $110 billion no less than. California doesn’t have wherever close to that sort of funding for top velocity rail, so that they’re constructing what they will proper now with no thought of how they’re ever going to complete. What went so improper right here? In October 2023, I went to Fresno, California. And what I heard as I walked that monitor with the engineers who’ve constructed it and the individuals overseeing it — it wasn’t engineering issues, it was political issues. There are components of the high-speed rail line that intersect with freight rail strains, however the freight rail strains are so busy within the vacation season that some impose a building moratorium from October to December. So in these areas, building simply stops for months, yearly. Why did the authority start building within the Central Valley, reasonably than close to the megacities? Nicely, one motive was that when California utilized for federal cash, the Obama administration needed bids that will enhance air high quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal authorities supplied, it wasn’t actually to construct high-speed rail. It was to start constructing high-speed rail in ways in which addressed air air pollution in particular communities. The Central Valley is poorer and extra polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there. And so did the preliminary building. However that made it much less probably. Excessive velocity rail would generate the ridership, the political assist or the monetary backing to ever really end. And that, after all, is unhealthy for air air pollution in Fresno and throughout the state. Trains are cleaner than vehicles, however excessive velocity rail has needed to clear each inch of its route via environmental critiques, with lawsuits lurking round each nook. The environmental assessment course of started in 2012, and by 2024, 12 years later, it nonetheless wasn’t accomplished. What has taken so lengthy on high-speed rail just isn’t hammering nails or pouring concrete. [CLIP: Good morning all. Welcome to the California High-Speed Rail finance and audit committee meeting.] It’s course of. 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 enterprise homeowners, with residence homeowners, with farm homeowners, with different components of the federal government. These negotiations price time, which price cash. These negotiations result in modifications within the route or the design or the development. And that prices cash and that prices time. These negotiations are the product of many years of liberal insurance policies meant to guard towards authorities abuses. They usually could do this, however additionally they stop authorities from constructing shortly or affordably. Within the time California has spent failing to finish its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has constructed greater than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. The Chinese language authorities doesn’t spend years debating with judges over whether or not it wants to maneuver a storage facility. Its energy results in abuse and imperiousness. It additionally results in trains. And look, I don’t need America to turn out to be China, however I do need it to have the ability to construct 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 venture in New York Metropolis — [CLIP: This is the first major expansion of the New York City subway in more than 50 years.] — it was the most costly subway venture by kilometer the world has ever seen. Has New York dramatically reformed its insurance policies to make the following one simpler 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, after all 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 many years of delay and the billions of price overruns on Boston’s Large Dig change how Massachusetts builds? Probably not. California. California has the worst housing downside within the nation. In 2022, the state had 12 % of the nation’s inhabitants. It had 30 % of the nation’s homeless inhabitants, and it had % — 5-0 — of its unsheltered homeless inhabitants. Has this unfathomable failure led to California constructing extra properties than it was constructing a decade in the past? No. It hasn’t. In the previous couple of many years, Democrats took a improper flip. They turned the celebration that believes in authorities, that defends authorities, not the celebration that forces authorities to work. That is a clumsy time to make this argument. Elon Musk and DOGE are attempting to raze the federal authorities to the bottom. Musk has been a loud critic of California’s high-speed rail venture, calling it a fraud, saying we must always simply let him construct his imaginary Hyperloop as a substitute. However in actuality, he’s by no means supplied a plan that will work to construct something higher or cheaper than high-speed rail. His various, in reality, is nothing. And I refuse to simply accept that that is our alternative. A Democratic Get together that won’t make authorities work, and a Republican Get together that wishes to make authorities fail. What these two events have created over many years is shortage. Shortage of properties, of excellent infrastructure, of unpolluted power, of public items. However the distinction between them is that the populist proper loves shortage. It’s powered by shortage. When there may be not sufficient to go round, we glance with suspicion on anybody who may take what we’ve got. Look, Donald Trump might have run on extra. He might have run on bringing Texas’s housing insurance policies to the nation. In Houston, there isn’t any zoning code, so constructing is straightforward, and the typical residence sells for a bit over $300,000. Evaluate that to Los Angeles, the place the typical residence now sells for over $1 million. As an alternative, the housing disaster turned a cudgel they use towards 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 might have run on the success of Operation Warp Pace had in dashing up the Covid vaccines. As an alternative, he’s slashing authorities funding for science and medical analysis, and firing scientists. He might have run on making it simpler to construct power of every kind in America. As an alternative, he’s making an attempt to destroy the photo voltaic and wind industries. He might have run on making it simpler for Individuals to make issues and to commerce them with the world. As an alternative, he’s making an attempt to chop worldwide commerce, imposing tariffs and alienating companions. Elon Musk is wealthy due to SpaceX and Tesla — firms which are constructed on federal subsidies. However he’s slashing what authorities can do, reasonably than reimagining what it will possibly do. The reply to a politics of shortage is a politics of abundance. A politics that asks what it’s that folks really want after which organizes authorities and markets to verify there may be sufficient of it. That doesn’t provide the childishly easy divides which have so deformed our politics. Authorities just isn’t merely good always. It isn’t merely unhealthy always. Typically authorities has to get out of the best way — like in housing. Typically it has to take a central function, like in creating markets or organizing sources for applied sciences that don’t but exist and that we want and which are too dangerous for markets to fund. There’s going to be stress over these subsequent few years, as Elon Musk and Donald Trump dismantle the federal authorities to see solely the sins of the MAGA proper. And don’t get me improper, the MAGA proper is harmful. A resistance is required. However so too is an alternate. If liberals are not looking for Individuals to show to the false guarantees of strongmen, they should provide them the fruits of efficient authorities. But when Democrats are to turn out to be the celebration of abundance, they should confront their very own function in creating shortage. Liberals spent a era working at each stage of presidency in society to make it more durable to construct recklessly. They received used to crafting coalitions and laws that gave everybody a little bit of what they needed, even when it meant the ultimate product was astonishingly costly or many years late or maybe by no means discovered its method to completion in any respect. Then they defined away governments failures. They excuse their very own selfishness, placing out yard indicators saying “No human being is against the law,” “Kindness is the whole lot,” at the same time as they fought reasonably priced housing close by and pushed the working class out of the cities they ran. To unmake this machine can be painful, but it surely’s obligatory. If liberals don’t make authorities work, zealots like Elon Musk are going to return in and burn it down.