OPINION:
If Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York, he will put the city at loggerheads with the abundance movement, a pro-growth agenda offered by moderate Democrats as an answer to President Trump’s populist policies: tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation.
Hard-left liberals such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Mr. Mamdani want to double down on taxing the rich and government-sponsored enterprises to redress inequality and alleged free market failures.
That bucks the Democratic Party’s moribund voter approval ratings, but it’s difficult to decipher how much of that is fueled by passing outrage about the party’s cover-up of President Biden’s declining mental capacities.
Moderates are energized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, “Abundance.” It posits that liberals have focused too much on risk avoidance and regulation that create barriers to innovation and growth (for example, excessive building codes and land use regulations that keep too many projects from getting done).
When running for president, Vice President Kamala Harris embraced the “Yes in my backyard” movement when promising to build 3 million homes.
Reformist sentiments extend to woke obsessions for public education.
Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff for President Obama and former Chicago mayor, says Democrats talk too much about bathrooms and not enough about student achievement.
All this plays out as the federal government faces financial peril. Mr. Biden’s spending on infrastructure, industrial policies and expanding social programs increased the federal deficit from 4.6% to 6.4% of gross domestic product.
Now, President Trump and the Republican congressional leadership seem intent on slashing taxes without curbing spending enough to break the upward trend.
If abundance becomes the new Democratic mantra, voters should ask whether it’s just another ruse to raise taxes, which seems inevitable given the bond market’s reaction to Mr. Trump’s fiscal plans.
Regulatory reform would be a tough lift for Democrats. It violates Mr. Truman’s admonition: “If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.”
Democrats depend on a lot: wealthy liberal donors who can skip the subway, ride in limos and send their children to private schools; unions invested in protectionism for their private-sector members and blue cities tied up in bureaucratic knots to boost government employment; and lawyers who enable regulations and abusive public engagement requirements that make improving public transit and a decent air traffic control system seemingly unaffordable.
I acknowledge some suspicion of Mr. Emanuel.
Chicago is hardly a well-run city. Thirty-one percent of its public school teachers have so much confidence in what they do that they send their own children to private schools.
The abundance movement could seize the Democratic agenda, but lacking a charismatic leader like Mr. Trump willing to move fast and break things, the party’s seasoned apparatchiks will roll out high-sounding market incentives to move public behavior that are covers for tax increases, more regulation, union self-dealing and municipal bloat.
Look at New York City’s transit system.
It cost $2.5 billion to build a mile of the first phase of the long-promised Second Avenue Subway.
That’s 8 to 12 times more expensive than comparable projects in Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain. Those places have mind-boggling regulations and unions, but none is so constraining, expensive and exasperating as the bureaucracy-union cabal choking the Big Apple.
To overcome the system’s moribund condition, the city is imposing a steep congestion tax on motorists driving through Midtown Manhattan to motivate public transportation use and finance a modernization program. The transit authority can borrow against the projected revenue to finance capital projects.
Neglected in media coverage of the liberal pitch for this motorist tax is that the subway system has accumulated debt through past failed modernization projects. Those are already sucking revenue from myriad other special taxes and fees on payrolls, motorists and petroleum businesses and a slice of the general city sales tax.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says “everybody needs to read ‘Abundance,’” but she has done little to implement reforms that would lower the costs of mass transit projects.
Instead, she is lobbying Washington for more money because the congestion tax can’t nearly fund the system’s $68 billion capital improvement needs.
To break through, moderate Democrats need to find common cause with populist Republicans who share their suspicions of corporate excesses and bureaucratic overreach.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s edition of Health and Human Services could thrive just as easily in a Democratic administration.
Democrats could start with an agenda to reform permitting and approval processes for housing and big construction projects by creating a one-stop, time-limited process where all the interest groups get their say but whose decisions would be final.
This column in 2022 and the Manhattan Institute more recently endorsed such an approach.
After Mr. Trump’s tariffs inflation and towering interest rates have disappointed Americans, they will be ready for a third way.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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