Tag Archives: U.S. politics

January 2020 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Open cyberwarfare became a thing in the 2010s. We read the individual headlines but didn’t connect the dots. When you do connect the dots, it’s a little shocking what’s going on.
Most hopeful story:
  • Democratic socialism actually does produce a high quality of life for citizens in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the hard evidence shows that the United States is slipping behind its peer group in many measures of economic vibrancy and quality of life. The response of our leaders is to tell us we are great again because that is what we want to hear, but not do anything that would help us to actually be great again or even keep up with the middle of the pack. This is in the hopeful category because solutions exist and we can choose to pursue them.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

election 2020!

I’m going to try not to get too carried away with election 2020 posts. For one thing, a lot of people know a lot more than me about election 2020. Nate Silver for example. In 2012 I made a little spreadsheet electoral college model that helped me understand the election that year. By 2016, that sort of thing was so easy to find on the internet and so much more sophisticated than anything I could hope to come up with that it wasn’t really worth the trouble. For another thing, it can be fun to forecast the outcomes of certain events, sports for instance, and come back later to see how you did. Sports are fun because you pretend to care about them, but you know deep down that they don’t matter. Politics is not like that – they matter and I care, so it is just not that fun to be wrong.

Okay, with that rambling preamble, and before the first voting starts in the Iowa caucus (I’m writing on Sunday, January 26), I’m going to give my predictions. But before I give my predictions, let me be open and honest about what I want to happen. I want Bernie Sanders to be elected President, and I want him to serve alongside a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. This would give the United States a chance to tackle the systemic corruption problem that is dragging our nation down, and put us on a path to future success. Elizabeth Warren would have a chance of doing this too, and I actually prefer her policy positions overall, but I think Bernie Sanders is the stronger leader and the leader we need right now.

I don’t think that is what is going to happen. Of the three (President Bernie Sanders, Democratic House, Democratic Senate), the Democratic Senate is particularly unlikely. Let’s look at PredictIt – gamblers there are giving about a 70/30 chance of the Senate remaining in Republican hands. Those are not awful odds for Democrats, but in a straight-up betting situation you would not take those odds. And keep in mind, a super-majority of 60 in the Senate is required to pass major legislation, not just a majority of 51. So even if Sanders or Warren gets in as President, and assuming the House stays Democratic as seems likely, it will be close to impossible to get major progressive legislation through on issues like campaign finance, health care, childcare or education. A Republican Senate will also block any efforts to reengage with the United Nations or ratify treaties on things such as climate change or human rights. A Democratic President will be stuck trying to fine-tune rules and regulations across the executive branch, rebuild the State Department and shape foreign policy to the extent possible through the executive branch.

Let’s start with general election polls out as of right now. People say these don’t mean anything. But I recall looking at Clinton vs. Trump in these polls, before we knew that either of them would be the nominee in 2016, and being surprised that people thought Trump would beat her. The same polls showed Bernie Sanders beating Trump. So let’s look at these wildly inaccurate, not very useful polls on RealClearPolitics as of Sunday, January 26.

  • Biden vs. Trump: Biden leads by 4.3% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 1 shows Trump leading and 1 shows a tie, while the others show Biden leading by 2-9%.
  • Sanders vs. Trump: Sanders leads by 3.2% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 1 shows Trump leading , while the others show Sanders leading by 1-8%.
  • Warren vs. Trump: Warren leads by 1.4% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 2 show Trump leading and 1 shows a tie, while the others show Warren leading by 5-7%.
  • Incidentally, today PredictIt gives the eventual Republican nominee a 52% chance of beating the eventual Democratic nominee, which doesn’t exactly gel with the numbers above.

The first thing that occurs to me is that these polls (not counting PredictIt) show any of the three most likely Democratic nominees winning the popular vote, whereas they showed Hillary losing it at a similar point in 2016 (based on my memory, I don’t know how to get the historical poll data). Democrats have reasons to be confident, but they are under-confident for obvious reasons. They are probably about as under-confident right now as they were over-confident as of Hillary Clinton’s victory party-like last rally in Philadelphia on election-eve 2016.

The second thing that occurs to me is that the Warren thing is just too close for comfort. I like Warren, but she seems like a risky nominee when Bernie Sanders is so similar in his policy views, and is the stronger potential leader in my view. Similar to Obama, people have this weird reaction to her as an elitist egghead. I personally am comforted when I feel like the people leading the country have a better grasp of subjects like economics and history than I do, but it does not seem as most of my fellow humans share these feelings.

Which leaves us with Sanders and Biden. Let’s go back to Nate Silver and his Monte Carlo models which are so much better than anything I could come up with. His model suggests a 58% chance that no Democratic candidate wins a majority of delegates. Biden has a 42% chance, Sanders a 22% chance, and there is a 15% chance that nobody gets a majority. Nate points out that in the event nobody gets a majority, but somebody gets a clear plurality, one thing that could happen is that the delegates cast votes for their pledged candidate in the first round of voting, but the candidates and delegates arrange in advance for the plurality candidate to get the majority of votes in the second round. I think you have to say that the two most likely outcomes as of today are that Biden gets a majority of delegates on the first vote, or Biden gets a clear plurality of delegates and gets a majority vote on a second ballot as a pre-determined outcome. Put those two together and this is the likely outcome – the Biden vs. Sanders showdown goes to Biden, the Biden vs. Trump showdown goes to Biden, and we have President Biden.

Now let me tell you why my purely subjective, purely anecdotal experience suggests that a President Sanders is a real possibility. It could be that I am rationalizing what I want to happen, of course, which would make me a human being, but nonetheless here it is. I am originally from Martinsville, Virginia, a former Appalachian manufacturing powerhouse that has fallen on very hard times, and this is an understatement. My grandparents’ generation moved from rural subsistence lifestyles to urban factory worker lifestyles. My parents generation worked in those factories when they were young, then got laid off when the factories moved to Mexico and eventually China. I remember friends and relatives railing against Bill Clinton and NAFTA because they thought this took their jobs and the quality of life of their families away. Now, in my personal view, NAFTA was just the final nail in the coffin created by decades of policies meant initially to prop up Cold War allies, which then proved a convenient narrative for multinational corporations, and turned out to be straightforward to represent in abstract mathematical models by academic economists.

Barrack Obama made Martinsville, Virginia one of his early campaign stops, and I know for a fact that some of my hillbilly friends and relatives you would never expect to vote for him bought into his “hopey changey” vision and voted for him in 2008 and 2012. When 8 years of Obama didn’t noticeably improve their lives, and the Democrat running in 2016 had the last name “Clinton”, these same friends and relatives voted for Trump in 2016. I think people who self-identify as America’s lost industrial base in Pennsylvania (where I now live), Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin did the same. To state the obvious, 2020 is not 2016, there is no candidate named Clinton, and Bernie Sanders won the 2016 primaries in some of these states. At least some of these “working class” Trump voters are going to love Bernie Sanders. Combine this with the coin toss in Florida which went Trump’s way in 2016, an outside chance of Texas flipping Democratic in 2020, and uncertainty about the economy, and Bernie has a good chance. Like I said, Democrats are under-confident.

So let’s be clear: I think the odds favor Biden, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate. I think Sanders, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate is the second most likely outcome. Trump, a Democratic House, and a Republic Senate is probably the third most likely outcome. Nobody knows what is going to happen with the economy or geopolitical events, but in the next 11 months something is probably going to happen. Sanders, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate is not a high probability, but as Nate Silver might point out, a sports metaphor might help us realize that the odds are not that different from perhaps an underdog like the Philadelphia Eagles winning the 2018 Superbowl (which they did). It’s likely enough to be worth fighting for.

a “decade of liberal failure”?

According to Alex Pareene at The New Republic, the 2010s were a “decade of liberal failure”. He cites the escalation of the Afghanistan war, so carefully considered by Nobel prize-winning Obama, devolving into an quagmire with no obvious point and no obvious way out. He believes that the stimulus package and Affordable Care Act basically worked, but the Obama administration purposely designed them to work behind the scenes. They actually benefited people, but people don’t give the administration any credit for those benefits, and Republicans are able to successfully play on this misconception.

undeclared U.S.-Russia war?

I’m not familiar with this blog yasha.substack.com, but it makes a somewhat convincing argument that the U.S. and Russia are fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, and that is a theme running throughout the impeachment proceedings.

If you read the impeachment literature, including the articles of impeachment, you’ll find the notion that we are at war with Russia underlies a major part of the case against Trump. Aside from the charges of self-dealing and corruption and attempts to influence an election, Trump’s other overarching crime is he “compromised American national security” and “injured national security” by slightly delaying the nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine that had been approved by Congress. The argument is that he will “remain a threat to national security” if he remains president and so must be removed. This line of thinking is expressed even more clearly in the House Judiciary Committee report on impeachment.

yasha.substack.com

a “decade of disillusion”?

According to Vice magazine, the 2010s were a “decade of disillusion”. The first article in the series covers how the world went from cautious optimism to something approaching giving up on climate change. Other articles cover how the decade “broke American politics”, the worsening inequality situation, and the opioid crisis.

2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
  • FEBRUARY: Cyber-attacking may be a lot easier than cyber-defending. Also, nuclear proliferation is back partly thanks to diplomatic unforced errors by the United States.
  • MARCH: Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
  • APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
  • MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
  • JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
  • JULY: The water situation in India, and the major city of Chennai in particular, sounds really bad.
  • AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
  • SEPTEMBER: Being a TSA air marshal may be the worst job ever.
  • OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
  • NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
  • DECEMBER: Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
  • FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
  • MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
  • APRIL: There is forward progress on a male birth control pill.
  • MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
  • JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
  • JULY: Deliberate practice is how you get better at something.
  • AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
  • SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
  • OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story! 
  • NOVEMBER: There is progress on carbon capture technology. Also, just restoring soil on previously degraded farm and grazing land could provide large benefits worldwide. There may also be real progress on fusion power.
  • DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
  • FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
  • MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
  • APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
  • MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
  • JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
  • JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
  • AUGUST: Liquid hydrogen could theoretically be used as a jet fuel.
  • SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
  • OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
  • NOVEMBER: Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy“. This may allow us all to live lives of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
  • DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.

There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.

Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.

The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.

Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.

You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.

There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.

And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.

socialism by the numbers

We can argue about the ideology of “socialism” vs. “capitalism”, often without even clearly defining these terms. It’s harder to argue with an avalanche of clearly presented evidence. This article from Current Affairs lays out the numbers showing the United States gradually slipping behind it’s developed country peer group in all areas. Consistently, the Scandinavian and Northern European countries that combine high productivity with policies to redistribute some of the wealth do the best. Our Anglo-American cousins the UK, Canada and Australia tend to do a little better than the U.S. but have still fallen behind the leaders of the pack.

The U.S. does well on measures of average income and wealth, but very poorly on measures of median income and wealth. We do poorly on measures of free time, infant and maternal mortality, life satisfaction, and innovation. I’m sure you can argue about how some of these indicators are defined and measured, but the overall trend is clear – we are creating financial wealth, but not sharing it and not creating satisfying or healthy lives for the majority, and we are continuing to slip behind our peers.

what urban and rural voters have in common

This article in Governing is mostly about what urban and rural voters do not have in common, why rural voters have a disproportionate share of politic power relative to their numbers, and why politicians therefore cater to them and tend to downplay urban issues, which are the issues that affect the vast majority of citizens. However, the article included a couple of paragraphs on what urban and rural voters have in common, which I thought were insightful.

Low-income residents of urban neighborhoods who know they’ll never be able to afford to live in the glitzy new apartment building that’s going up are, economically speaking, in a similar boat as rural residents who’ve seen the factory shut down and the area left behind by the global economy. “Urban neighborhoods that are dealing with population loss are dealing with the same issues of abandonment as low-income rural counties,” says Hill, the Ohio State professor. “The problems are the same: drug abuse, abandoned factories, losing kids to places with rising opportunity.”

Governing

I can actually attest to this, originally being from an Appalachian factory town, then from a former Pennsylvania coal town, and now living in central Philadelphia. The problems of poor people, and the problems of middle class working people, and the problems of working parents, and the problems of the disabled and the retired, etc. are pretty much the same everywhere. The difference is that urban areas are where most of the productive economic activity that can be taxed come from. And investments in infrastructure and programs in relatively dense population centers can just serve a lot more people for the money spent compared to less dense areas. And finally, denser areas with universities and startup companies and corporate R&D centers are where people come together to learn and solve problems.

Of course, one party in particular is good at playing to the emotions of rural voters and convincing them that they are the only real Americans, that people in the cities are not like them, are a threat to them and are draining resources away from them, when in fact the opposite is true. Sometimes they even convince suburban voters that their interests do not lie with other voters in the metropolitan areas they are a part of.

how defense cuts could fund Medicare for all

This New York Times op-ed goes through a series of defense cuts that could save $300 billion per year, enough to fund Medicare for All. The big ones are shutting down the big wars that are accomplishing little or nothing (or worse, creating future enemies and risks), closing foreign bases (and/or asking the foreign countries to fund them if they actually want them there), and phasing out most or all nuclear weapons.

I personally am indifferent between paying a monthly insurance premium vs. a monthly payroll tax to provide the same care at the same cost. But if we could get part of the way there with no tax increases at all, that is even better. Or, we could have a serious discussion about where else some of those current defense dollars could be spent (by the government) that would make us safer, richer, or healthier in the future.

my campaign platform for Philadelphia

I have to figure out who to vote for in local elections on Tuesday (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 3), so I like to think about what I would do if I were somehow put it charge. Now, I focus on policy rather than politics, and good policy is probably not good politics, so if you are trying to get elected you should take my advice with a grain of salt.

Policies that I would support at the federal and state level do not translate well to the local level in my mind. Looking at the whole country, a fair distribution of the wealth we have is important. At the local level, we have concentrated poverty within a narrow political jurisdiction, so there may not be enough wealth to go around, and if you try to grab what wealth there is and redistribute it, you may just scare the wealth across the jurisdictional border, which is just a couple miles away in any direction. So you have to focus on growing the pie if you want to have a chance at helping the poor. The local Democrats don’t do this – they are all about redistribution, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. The local Republicans are mostly racist jerks. There are a few independents who support pieces and parts of an agenda I could get behind, but nobody comes close to supporting a complete agenda to really explore real solutions to systemic problems.

So I thought about it and here is what I came up with:

  • Improve management of all city services and departments. Does this even need to be said? Yes, absolutely. We have a political and bureaucratic culture that resists learning and is tolerant of amateurism. We need to be open to learning about and adopting best practices from elsewhere, in all areas of government. We need to recruit, train, and retain talented individuals at all levels. We need to develop the leaders of tomorrow. The end result can be better services at lower cost.
  • Grow the work force and tax base. We can make it easy to start, license, and operate new businesses. We can connect the public, private and education sectors to provide education and training that matches actual skills with actual jobs. We can expand the innovation ecosystem to encourage startups and incubators, research and development, particularly in the biotech sector which is a local strength. None of this requires huge public spending. Philadelphia was a city of 2 million that has shrunk to about 1.5. We have room for at least half a million more workers and taxpayers, even more if we are willing to densify some neighborhoods. The gentrification issue makes this hard to talk about, but these could be highly productive, educated, talented professional people. Growing the pie with new taxpayers of some financial means would ultimately be good for everyone. Perhaps the gentrification issue could be somewhat defused if these new people were encouraged to spread out across many neighborhoods, all with excellent and equal transportation, education and other city services.
  • Replace regressive taxes with progressive ones, without increasing the overall tax burden. With the overall tax base growing, we could finally think about how to make it more fair and less burdensome to hardworking people and productive businesses. I don’t have all the answers here because this is not my area of expertise, but we need to follow the evidence, best practices from elsewhere, and try to at least bring local taxes in line with the larger metro area. We need to chip away at the public pension funding problem, because that will eventually come back to bite us if we don’t.
  • Law enforcement, criminal justice, and incarceration reform. I don’t have all the answers here, but again, look at best practices from elsewhere and follow the evidence. There are enormous potential financial savings here.
  • Preschool to community college education reform. Do I have to say it again? Learn about best practices, follow the evidence and innovate continuously. This is enormously difficult in the United States, but we have to keep chipping away at it.