democrats should be the party of helping people do stuff
"little" annoyances turn people against you
it’s all permitting
As Pete Buttigieg has said recently, in trying to stop bad things, Democrats have embraced burdensome process that also makes it hard to do good things. Pollution and greenhouse gasses are bad, so we wrote some environmental regulations. But over time, those environmental regulations have actually made it differentially more difficult to build low-carbon sources of energy than fossil fuel energy. So the environmental laws make it easier to build natural gas than solar. That’s bad.
In addition to embracing process for its own sake, Democrats have put in well-meaning rules that turn out to be pretty annoying when you actually encounter them. A recent example is Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s story that to serve fresh fruit, a daycare would have had to install six additional sinks. But it would be OK to serve toddlers unhealthy food like chips. I’m sure this rule was made trying to make sure food preparation places were sanitary, but you should not need a full industrial kitchen to peel a banana for a 3 year old.
In my home state of New Jersey, I have two gripes along these lines.
The first one is simple: the plastic straw ban. New Jersey banned restaurants handing out plastic straws unless you ask. This is really annoying. It has turned me into a plastic straw hoarder. I do not like paper straws. Everyone I know is annoyed by this law and we view it as dumb signaling rather than effective policy. We furtively hand each other plastic straws like outlaws in a spy thriller. Some people are sympathetic to the rule near the beach to keep beaches clean, but not statewide.
Second, I co-own a trading card store called Card Shop Near Me. It’s going great. But for about eight months we’ve been trying to up our occupancy limit from 13 to 19. Our physical space already meets the requirements for 19 occupants, but our building use code is B (office) rather than M (retail store). So, to change the use code at city hall from B to M, we first contacted the township. They informed us that they are not consultants so could not provide any opinion on what we should do or would need to do—even though they have an entire office of a dozen people! They further informed us that they have never done a change of use and so even if they did give advice they could not tell us what we needed to do. Sounds like a Franz Kafka novel.
Then, we contacted an architect, who had to make plans for our entire space showing they were compliant with an M use code. That was $2500. Then, we had to bring a letter to city hall and explain to the government what they needed to do to change our use code according to the state laws. We had to pay city hall $1000 for the privilege of explaining to them what they needed to do to change a letter from B to M in their system. Then, they showed up for an inspection without telling us what would be inspected. Initially, they could not find our building, so they put us down as failing the inspection for being closed (we were not). Then, when we contacted them again and explained to them where the building was (which was on the form we filled out!), they came and failed our inspection because we needed to put a battery in a backup light. So we are finding a battery and we get to re-schedule the inspection. I’m not sure if we’ll have to pay them another $1000 or not.
interactions with the government should not routinely piss people off
Our retail store experience is something that local business owners deal with every day. The government is an adversary, not here to help you follow the rules and run a successful business. This is true *even though* my business pays about $500 in taxes per month to the township that is failing to help us. We rented a space that had been empty for 3 years and spent $20,000 renovating it, in the process helping revitalize a plaza and generate all kinds of tax revenue. But they acted like they couldn’t be bothered to help us, like we were wasting their time.
This seems to be pretty common! Obviously, California is famous for thousands of pages of paperwork in “environmental assessments” for things like building carbon-reducing trains, or cancelling construction projects because someone complains about shadows. Nevada cancelled what would have been the country’s largest solar plant because some Sierra Club people thought it would mess up the view of the desert. New York’s rules required its congestion pricing scheme in Manhattan to undergo a “rigorous” environmental assessment that took years and (surprise!) found no substantial impacts. You don’t need to spend years and thousands of pages to figure out that fewer pollution-emitting cars on the road has good health and environmental outcomes. But we did it anyway.
The well-known phenomenon of it being impossible to do stuff in blue states has reached such an epidemic that the projection for the 2030 census and Electoral College reapportionment is hugely GOP-favored. Basically all of the core Dem states are losing seats, meaning that winning the upper midwest will no longer be enough for Dems to win the White House. What a scary thought.
This is pretty dire stuff, both at the microlevel of my trading card store and the macrolevel of national politics. I generally don’t like arguments that range so much in scale, but I really think this one does: we have to embrace building things and doing things, not embrace process that stops things from happening. Europe is famous for saying it wants to be a “regulatory superpower.” Fuck that, let’s build.
To their great credit, some Republican-controlled states have taken more of the doing stuff approach. Texas is building solar plants rapidly, contributing to overall American decarbonization. Despite all of the politicians in California who claim to care about climate change, Texas is doing more to fight it by creating a robust market for solar panels which in turn fuels further innovation in the solar panel market. And Texas is obviously building housing, as they are projected to gain more Electoral College votes and House Representatives than any other state.
making the case directly to voters
Roughly speaking, Democrats lost ground most in solid blue areas in the 2024 election. New Jersey went for Harris by only 5 points after going for Biden by 16, as Asian and Hispanic Americans flocked to Trump and the GOP. Part of the explanation here is high housing costs, which is a direct result of too many rules that stop stuff from happening.
But I’m willing to bet that some of the broader discontent with Dems is dumb stuff like the plastic straw ban in NJ. And although voters don’t feel it directly, the inability to build power plants or transmission lines or trains indirectly increases costs which makes people’s lives worse. If electricity prices had declined in blue-ish states due to aggressive permitting in the last 4 years, Dem margins probably would have been higher. Maybe we win the upper midwest and the election.
A fun fact is that Asian-Americans found businesses at a really high rate and Asian Americans also swung away from Dems this year in huge numbers. Do we think NYC Asian-American business owners were registering disapproval with NYC’s Dem city hall? Quite possible!
To get votes, Democrats need to do stuff that people feel directly in their lives and they go “this is good!” Part of that is allowing people to live the lives they want. So, less banning stuff and more letting people make stuff. If you want people to make better decisions, reduce the cost of the better thing. Make solar power the cheapest power, electric trains the most comfortable and cheapest form of transit, and so on.
my 5 point plan for liberalization
What the Democrats need in technical terms is to liberalize. We have too much state process. This word “liberalization” is likely to anger some left of center folks, but it’s not a bad thing in itself—you can be too liberal (no rules which allows businesses to pollute) or not liberal enough (impossible to build solar panels pending a 4 year environmental review). We need to get a bit more liberal.
Here’s my plan.
Government agencies like permitting and planning departments should be rewarded for approving things and providing proactive, good constituent service.
Obviously, make sure people follow the rules, but *help* them follow the rules
Agencies should assume they will need to help small businesses comply with the law and should develop strategies around this
There are a ton of well understood customer service practices the government could import. Why didn’t I have a single point of contact who was responsible for shepherding my zoning change through the process? That person should get paid more for more successful permits.
We should lean more on economies of scale, and to the extent possible laws should be enforced at the level they are made. In New Jersey, zoning and construction codes are determined at the state level but enforced at the municipal level. That makes no sense. There should just be a state department of zoning and construction which can actually have the expertise to administer the state laws, unlike my local city hall. You want uniformity and predictability, not town-to-town variation.
Environmental and similar reviews should be biased in the sense that solar power is better than coal power, building dense housing is better than sprawl, building electric trains is better than building a highway, and electric cars are better than gas cars.
We should not have to re-invent the wheel in every environmental review. Saying no to housing or building solar panels should require a really high bar of evidence, not some people at a random meeting saying it will mess up their view of a desert or cast a shadow on a park at 11AM.
Saying no to a coal plant on environmental grounds should obviously be pretty easy. The bar to build a new coal plant should be pretty high!
Stop random busybodies from having input at every stage of the process. You should not be able to go to some random town council meeting and kill a construction project on someone else’s land that has been in the works for years. If you *need* to have public input, do it once at the beginning and mandate that the agency doing the public input endeavor to assess how representative the views are. But in general, the right time for public input is at the ballot box. Then, representatives should write the laws and agencies should execute them. Doris who lives down the street should not be able to come in at the 11th hour and say “I know you did all this permitting stuff but I don’t like the way the building looks so let’s do another 6 months of design review.”
When a law provides a minor inconvenience to a large number of people for a negligible benefit, don’t do it. Petty things like that piss people off. Rather than ban plastic straws, what levers do you have to incentivize high quality biodegradable straws? Are straws really the best thing for the statehouse to be spending legislative cycles on?
in conclusion
Americans are industrious. We are generally speaking a nation of people who have directly or whose ancestors self-selected to be here by searching for a better life. We start businesses, we change careers, we go to school, we try new things, we do stuff. The government should facilitate citizens doing things, not make it hard for them to do things.
The government is going to support this type of drive either under Democratic control or—if the Democrats cannot get their shit together—under Republican control. Voters demand it.
I would prefer Dem control because it will come with nice side-effects like a better healthcare system and funding for Social Security and Medicare. But to get there, Dems need to lean into a do stuff agenda. Help people build, start businesses, and get an education. And help them by making the *process* for doing stuff as seamless and easy to understand as possible. Don’t have a terrible process and then give a few lottery winners a pile of money to navigate the terrible process with.