April 4, 2025 • 48 mins
In this chat, Tara Jirari and Gary Winslett dive into the nitty-gritty of recent tariff policies—how they’re hitting everyday folks at the store and affecting workers’ livelihoods, plus what’s really driving the politicians to make these calls. They toss around ideas about how Democrats could shake things up with a fresh game plan, zeroing in on practical, supply-side fixes for the economy. Think cool, out-of-the-box stuff like using mass timber to tackle the housing crunch. Along the way, they also riff on how culture’s shifting, how different generations see things, and why it’s high time for a reboot in how politicians talk and act.
Check out the Chamber of Progress!
https://progresschamber.org/
https://www.therebuild.pub/
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Today on Progressive, we get to chat with the Chamber of
Progress is Tahara Jarry and Gary Winslet.
Tara is the Director of EconomicAnalysis and a rising star in
the world of public policy. Gary is an assistant professor
in the Political Science department and the International
Politics and Economics program at Middlebury College, where he
has taught since 2018. The two of them are currently
launching an incredible new blog, The Rebuild, focusing on
(00:20):
how Democrats can build more lower costs and win again.
All right, Tara, Gary, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having. Us nice to be here with you.
I mean, I gotta say, it is quitean honor.
After you guys launched the the rebuild, I remember seeing that
post come up and I was like, oh,I gotta read into this.
But obviously as director of Econ analysis and Gary hadn't
(00:42):
written books on trade and politics, I wanted to talk to
you both about the tariffs the president announced yesterday,
the blanket long-awaited tariffs.
Obviously it's been, I want to say a shit show is the right way
to say it, but can you talk a little bit more about what these
tariffs actually mean for trade for people, for especially
people like me, like young men? Obviously it's trade with China,
(01:05):
it's electronic goods, but can you build on that a little bit?
Yeah, Tara, do you want to go first?
Yeah, I was just going to say I think the academic term is
should show just from seeing just the lack of cohesiveness
with this rollout. I mean, even today you have
people in the admin saying that this is a negotiation tactic.
Even Trump's son put a couple tweets about that.
(01:27):
And then you have the actual White House itself saying that
they are not backing down here and this is just accumulation of
how the entire tariff policy hasbeen in the Trump admin.
It's where they say they are going to do one thing they make
a big spectacle of and then theyfail to communicate whether this
is actually going to be a permanent standing issue or if
it's something that they're justlike dangling in front of the
(01:47):
carrots other people. But as you mentioned, yes, we
have reciprocal tariffs, though I would not call them that.
They aren't really tit for tat. A lot of this are quite uneven.
I'm sure you even saw the islandcalled McDonald Island which has
no residence was even tariff as well.
So it just kind of makes no sense as to how they're doing
this, but how it impacts the broader ecosystem including jobs
(02:10):
for everyone. I would say the uncertainty
right now is taking the forefront for a lot of
companies. Some companies are hoping to get
exempted from this but they're not sure if they're able to.
Others are wait and see if they should pull it out or not.
Like, for example, we had the Nintendo released yesterday
where people were wondering whatthe price is going to be.
And that just should not be the case.
We should not be, you know, holding our breath every second,
(02:30):
every time something gets released to understand like, OK,
how much is the consumer going to be upholding a lot of this
cost? Yeah.
I mean the, the, the what I would add to that is just that
this is obviously going to be really bad for consumers, right?
Consumers are the people who ultimately end up paying that
tax on the imports. And you may not see that like
literally this afternoon becausethe stuff on the shelf wasn't
(02:51):
tariff, but you're definitely going to see price increases by
the end of this quarter, by quarter three.
That's going to, that's raising prices for people, that's taking
money out of your pocket. One of the estimates I saw
earlier today is that the middle50% household like end up paying
between 3000 and $3500 more overthe course of the year for
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these. That's a lot of money.
That's like multiple paychecks for a lot of people.
You know, that's, that's just that's a lot of money to be
taking out of people's pockets. And the other thing a lot of
people don't think about is thattariffs aren't just bad for
consumers, bad for workers because they raise the price of
inputs. So if you are a car
(03:33):
manufacturer, raising the price of steel and aluminum is driving
up the cost of making that. And so that makes that American
made car less competitive internationally and it makes it
less attractive for the buyer domestically.
And so it actually hurts manufacturing jobs.
So even the things that supposedly get helped actually
get hurt by these. All right, I was going to say,
(03:54):
I, I think a really good exampleof this was the Bush steel
tariffs. I'm sure you've all seen that
paper where it's remember correctly, it was like for every
one job save, it passed along like $900,000 in cost, something
like that. Yeah.
So, so I know the Bush steel tariffs super well because my
dad actually worked in a steel processing facility.
And so they, they hated the Bushsteel tariffs because they were
not people who like, he literally wore a hard hat at his
(04:17):
job. He was one of these people who
like political ads get made about high school educated work
in Birmingham, AL. And, you know, they imported raw
steel and then they did the higher value added, which is
they turn that raw steel into specialized pieces of steel that
all kinds of other higher end manufacturing firms needed.
(04:39):
Right. Like that's the thing you can
actually like have decent wages at, you know, that they're not
good wages in like literal raw steel production.
The margins are too low. But you can do advanced steel
processing and you can pay decent working class wages doing
that. Well, OK.
But then if you pay off all the imported steel, that actually
hurts people who work in that steel processing.
(05:01):
So yeah, I'm, I'm very familiar with how some of these things
work in in the steel industry. I would like to read a quote
from the Tax Foundation where they have it placed on like it's
just like blue graphic and it's just easy to read.
And this is something I always recommend.
You're communicating the impactsof tariff policy, but just
tariffs or taxes. The effects of higher steel
prices, largely a result of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, led to
(05:22):
a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs inthe steel consuming sector, a
loss larger than the total employment in the steel
producing sector at the time. And that's on one sector and
it's a pretty narrow tariff compared to all of the sweeping
stuff we got yesterday. Wow.
You know, it's just one of thosethings where you think like I,
(05:45):
why? Like, I guess I, I, that's the
thing I can't really seem to wrap my head around, right.
The whole rationale is we're going to bring jobs back, we're
going to bring manufacturing back.
It's like, that's OK, sure, but it seems to be pretty clear that
that's not going to help. And I guess what?
What is the restaurant? I can tell you what's going on
here. Imagine a castle, right?
And you're the gatekeeper at thecastle and you are just super
(06:08):
cynical and super greedy. What you want to do is you want
to make sure that the gate you keep is the only gate in and out
of the castle so that you can then charge however much you
want. What the Trump administration is
doing is erecting these super high tariff barriers and trade
walls so that then they can punch little holes in the wall,
(06:29):
which are these exemptions that they're going to give out.
And you can force businesses andwhole sectors even to come
begging before you. Trump loves nothing more than to
force people to come kiss the ring.
And so that's part of what this is about is forcing the kissing
of the ring. But there's also a second part
of it, which is that they just like cronyism, and they kind of
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like a certain authoritarian cronyism.
For years, the political right in the United States has been in
love with Hungary. What does Orban do?
Orban makes it so that in order to prosper as a business in
Hungarian society, you have to be on the same side as the
government politically. You cannot succeed as a
Hungarian business if you are not friends with the Orban
(07:13):
administration. That is what they would like to
copy paste in the United States.The only way to succeed in
business is to be part of Trump's friend circle.
It's the Trump welfare standard.I also think what Tim Walls was
saying yesterday is that I'm trying to understand these
tariffs and typical admins. You would have the methodology
(07:34):
behind it and it would make sense.
But for this certain aspect, youhave to have a little bit of a
psychology degree to understand what he is thinking that leads
him to get here because it's just like, it's honestly
economically illiterate. And it does not make sense if
you go from the logic route. So you have to like, go back to
who Trump is as a person and follow the steps there.
(07:55):
And like, a lot of it kind of boils down to he's like the he's
weirdly just a really big William McKinley fan.
His his fan favorite right, the president from the 1890s big
tariff guy. Was it the not minor reduction,
but the conquering all of the Western Hemisphere type?
Or was it the isolation? I just all of it's just bad,
(08:16):
right? But I like your point of the
psychological part because none of this makes sense, you know?
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm a PhD in econ, but
if I can understand it, something's really wrong, right?
I'm sure you both saw the math they used to calculate the
tariffs, and last I checked throwing in a bunch of Greek
letters and saying this is our formula and then multiplying 4
(08:37):
by 1/4, that's not. I don't think the thought is
supposed to work. Just throwing that out there.
No, I actually felt really bad for that comms person.
I was like. Well, the other thing too is
just like assuming that all non tariff barriers are
discriminatory is wrong. And like it just so happens
there's somebody who wrote a book on regulatory trade
(08:58):
barriers and it's me. And like that's wrong.
Like they could have just calledme and been like, are these a
form of trade discrimination? And I could have very clearly
explained to them that that is not true, that there are all
kinds of regulatory trade barriers that, I mean, are a few
of them discriminatory? Sure.
Can some of them be absolute? And, you know, the USTR should
(09:20):
fight them where they are. But just this blanket assumption
that every non tariff barrier amounts to discrimination, it's
just nutty. This is kind of a good point to
pivot, seeing as how they could have called you right, both of
you, you know, both of you are the experts, right?
They could have called you how to how to fix these things,
these things that they were elected on, you know, bringing
down costs, which it seems to melike that's gone out the window,
(09:42):
but they could have called experts.
And so so in that vein, I kind of want to pivot a little bit to
the rebuild and the Chamber of progresses work right?
You, I've seen a lot about, well, almost on every page about
making Democrats build and work kind of that general vibe, not
trying to get copyrighted, but the general vibe of just making
(10:04):
it work. And that seems to me what they
were saying they were going to do.
We're going to make these costs come down, going to fix the
housing fix, you know, cost of living, but your institute is
what actually doing that work. Can you tell me a little bit
more about the work at the rebuild and what separates you
from this obviously cronyism, but what the actual substantive
work you're doing to make these things real?
(10:26):
Yeah, I like to. So you see, like a lot of this
sometimes correlates with like the abundance framework.
And you see Ezra Klein, he like likes to make the joke a lot of
dark abundance and how Trump went into this presidency saying
that he is, you know, it's the golden age, golden abundance
seem like synonymous to one another.
So you have like high hopes. And again, like the incumbents
(10:47):
of the Democratic Party just were at a loss.
We were facing high prices, which this Admiral soon learn
the same lesson. And when you have someone come
saying I am going to offer you adifferent way, it's easy to see
why a swing voter might believe that, especially when you sadly
had the candidate who was sayingthey weren't going to do
anything otherwise or different than the current incumbent
(11:08):
president. And then you go on and you see
that a lot of this was just an ego game for Trump.
He just kind of wanted to repay a lot of the people who have
betrayed him previously. And he is just not interested in
governing and governing well, I like to always use the example
of the CHIPS Act because if you were someone who really wanted
to revitalize manufacturing industry, you would be looking
(11:32):
at a lot of bipartisan programs like the CHIPS Act.
But he had a major issue with the allocation process, which is
why it was very entailed with the DEI processes.
He wasn't a fan of that. Some people can find that
understandable. If it's very hard to allocate
the program that you want to make work, that's fine.
Logical solution would be to reform the allocation process.
But for him, he would rather just repeal it and throw tariffs
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every. And it just shows there's no
interest in building up. But right now, Democrats instead
are in a different playing fieldwhere we are the losers.
Right now, we don't have a majority.
And we have a lot of, you know, self reflection to understand
where we went wrong, which is the number one thing that we
pointed out at the rebuild. What Democrats got wrong, which
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is a lot of it was falling into process instead of focusing on
progress and how we can build from there.
And we think a #1 issue of that is going to be the cost of
living. Trump got very tired about
talking to the cost of living early on.
He even made the joke yesterday that talking about groceries in
the department itself is old fashioned, which shows how out
of touch he is working in this admin.
(12:37):
But it's not out of touch for the average person.
You look at your grocery cart, you look online every time you
want to buy something. Tariffs are going to make that
even worse. It's just going to be brought to
the front of your eye and it's something you can't turn away
from. So this is where Democrats
should be leaning into. Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those thingswhere I love all of what you're
saying, but I want to boil a little bit more of what we're
(12:59):
leaning into. Obviously abundance, you know,
came out and saw a lot of, I would say fanfare, but a lot of
like pushback of the anti monopolist.
But being the losing party, right, being out of power means
a lot of self reflection and looking at what went wrong.
I'm sure you've both read a lot of like Matthew Iglesias and his
stuff mentioning about how the previous administration was very
against some of the more supply side reforms.
And it seems to me that a lot ofthis abundance agenda or just
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cost of living agenda really comes down to more.
Can you talk a little bit more about what the rebuilding
specific what you guys are doingso about more right?
Yeah. So one of the things we're doing
is we're trying to rebuild the Democratic Party in a more
supply oriented direction. Like we're not opposed to the
social safety net. We think the social safety net
is great, but you can't redistribute your way out of a
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shortage if there are too few houses.
What you need to do is build more housing, and then that
actually helps your social safety net because Section 8
vouchers, for example, go a lot further in a context of housing
abundance over housing shortage.And for too long, Democrats got
stuck in this idea that you could tax and redistribute and
(14:07):
subsidized your way out of all economic problems.
Well, a lot of our problems actually have supply constraints
right now in in really negative ways.
Housing is the most obvious one,but it's not just housing.
We don't have enough doctors, and that's because of the
residency camp. We don't have enough electricity
transmission lines. And so that means that the solar
(14:27):
energy you can create in places like Arizona and Nevada can't
get too often where it's needed,right?
We don't have enough of a lot ofthese things.
And so if we want a more prosperous society, we actually
have to have more. And the other thing that's
really, really important about that is more benefits to people
at the bottom of the most, right?
(14:49):
So like, my favorite analogy is like musical chairs.
So if you think about musical chairs, it's fun game in 3rd
grade because there's like not quite enough chairs for the kids
that they got to fight over it. But like, that's not what you
want in American political economy.
What you want is so many chairs that even the kid with a bum
ankle has a chair. No problem, right?
Like you want a chair for everybody in American Society.
(15:12):
And so that's what we're doing is trying to rebuild the
Democratic Party. Any more economically
intelligent, supply oriented direction, because that's what's
ultimately going to reduce the cost of living.
And then when we govern in ways that that reduce the cost of
living and are effective, we canturn around to voters and say we
govern. Well, This is why you should
(15:33):
vote for us instead of Trump's madness.
I can say I love the the chairs analogy out if I remember
correctly, was that lifted almost directly from abundance.
The mention that or I want to say I heard.
That one. So it's been in YIMBY circles
for years, and there's actually good research on this done by
people like Chris Elmendorf. So there's actually like a lot
(15:54):
of research. As with so much in abundance,
much of its intellectual tentacles reach back to YIMBY.
Oh, yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that just because I
remember Elmendorf was the UC Davis professor, right, Chris
Elmendorf. It's funny hearing like all
these things wrapped together. But the thing with the music of
chairs, right? I want to say that was in
reference to housing, Like statecities that build the most
housing and have the most, of course, subsequent
(16:14):
affordability, have the lowest amounts of homelessness.
And when you put all that together, it kind of makes
sense. But I want to backtrack a little
bit because there's something that you've written a lot about
about monopolies and obviously abundance got a lot of Flack for
the Zephyr teach out and the whole like, Oh, we can just, you
know, anti monopoly our way out of these things and we can
redistribute the the wealth and then take it from these other
(16:35):
guys and just not seeming to understand that the point is
that there isn't enough and thatwe can just have more.
So you would read about real anti monopolists.
And so would you expand a littlebit more about that?
Sure, last week I had a piece titled with a real anti
monopolist, Please stand up because a lot of the people who
brand themselves as anti monopolist were, you know, they
had all these critiques of abundance that it doesn't go
(16:56):
after corporate concentration. And one of the things that I was
pointing out is that things likeso real page is a software that
uses algorithms to help propertyowner set prices.
And so this is something that a lot of the anti monopolist for
open arms about in terms of housing be like it's real
baseball. Look, if anybody, if anybody at
(17:17):
real page or who used real page was breaking the law, they
should absolutely be prosecuted.But even the highest estimates
of real pages impact is like only in certain markets.
And it was about $50.00 a month,which is not nothing.
But that's not the main driver of high housing cost, right?
The main driver of high housing cost is too few homes.
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And a lot of the way when you build more homes, what that
actually does is it reduces the market power of these
corporations who own lots of apartment units, right?
Like the way to weaken their leverage is to have lots of
supply. And so like more supply is the
real anti monopoly. And you can see this in all
kinds of other areas like certificate of need laws in
(18:00):
healthcare. Many states have these laws and
they are bananas. They literally say that in order
to provide a new medical service, you have to go before a
board and prove that there's a need for the service.
But in the vast majority of cases, your competitors get to
also come before the board and argue that no, no, actually
(18:20):
there's no need. So like, imagine if you wanted
to like set up a new like Mexican restaurant and you had
to go for a board and get like anew Mexican restaurant
certificate of need license, butall the other Mexican
restaurants got to show up and like fight your ability to open.
That's crazy. And that happens in healthcare
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in in over half of states. In state of North Carolina,
nearly 20 different medical services are governed under
certificate of need laws. We have good research that shows
that these laws drive up healthcare costs and drive down
healthcare access, particularly in rural settings.
Getting rid of those, that's real anti monopoly.
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That's part of abundance. That's part of what we've
written about as part of our cost of living agenda.
Like that's going to be the trueanti monopoly politics.
I think a lot of that has to do with, well, not a lot has to do,
but I think a lot of that addresses those core issues,
right? The things that people talk
about, people complain that Healthcare is too expensive and
then they go, oh, well, that's why we need Medicare for All or
(19:24):
housing too expensive. That's why we need public
housing or the rent control. And so God, geez.
OK, so you're putting a Band-Aidover a bullet hole.
That's not what we're looking for.
In that same vein, I want to go back to the housing part and the
mention of the Mexican restaurant analogy.
I think a lot of that is almost,well, one to one with housing.
And I would say Target, you're from California, right?
Or living Los Angeles. I'm originally from New York
(19:46):
City, but I do live in LA, yeah.And so you're plenty familiar
with obviously the Palisades fire and all the homes that are
lost that are now caught in permitting help.
And so in that same thing, I want to talk a little bit about
the rebuild and moreover the Chamber of Progress that your
proposed agenda for fixing thesethings.
I saw that you had written aboutan Operation Warp Speed for
California after the OR Los Angeles, more importantly after
the Palisades. Did you speak a little bit about
(20:07):
that? Yeah, so it was an insane time
just because again, I am from the East Coast, so I've never
witnessed a fire of this size before, especially not one that
I could just look outside my window and see.
So we were literally trapped in the house for a week and I'm
just over here thinking about like how long it is going to
take to build here. So I am in like my mid to late
(20:28):
20s right now. I am not at the house buying age
yet, but I will be soon. And when we do buy, we would
like it to be in California. But seeing the fire happened in
Pacific Palisades and Alameda toyou in Pasadena, you now have
affluent displaced refugees entering already a constrained
housing market in Los Angeles. It is going to be a bloodbath to
(20:53):
try and buy housing here and also just being familiar with
the housing codes and the over reliance on local input in
places like Los Angeles, as wellas the very exclusionary zoning
laws that make it so difficult to put any type of housing
outside of just a single family home in Los Angeles was
(21:15):
extremely worrying to think about.
We've already seen in the past week or so, it was only four
permits that have been allowed thus far since the fires have
happened. And I was watching this on the
news, a local channel as well. Also shout out to local news
throughout this time. They they were amazing.
They were killing it and they were asking them for the context
of this. They were like 4 like that
sounds like such a low number. What is this?
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And they're like, well, if you look at the outskope of how
California typically does handout permits, this does make
sense. And it's incredibly frustrating
when you have politicians who use now this politically popular
abundance, like lingo, includinglike slashing red tape, building
more, doing it fast. And you had Newsome capitalize
on that quite a bit. For example, he said, we are
(22:00):
going to remove like the timelines, we're going to build
fast. And now and then you click on
the bill page and you see, what's that little thing there?
Oh, it's a 10% cap. That means, sure, you can build
faster in the same area where wedon't even know if it's
environmentally safe to continuebuilding there.
And you can just build a slightly larger mansion.
(22:21):
Who is that going to help when the housing market is already so
strained, where people are already feeling they have to
bleed out? And why you are seeing record
numbers of people leaving California, but only the same
rich people can build the same houses, just slightly larger.
So it was just incredibly frustrating to hear them just
act as if they are doing the right thing.
They are now the new politicians.
(22:41):
Newsom went on a a podcast with Ezra Klein and he just had
again, all these work around answers.
And it's, it's just as someone who lives here and plans to
continue living here, you think about the younger generations
who are going to continue entering this market and just
feel like there's no way to be here.
And what's the logical solution for them to not live here?
(23:02):
Right, Well, I mean, I take it from someone who's been born and
raised in California, it's like you watch friends and families
move away because affordability and it isn't anything more than
that because people love the weather, the culture, the jobs
that you name it, whatever it is, they love it, but it's the
affordability. And so seeing like a lot of
these Co opted versions of abundance or we're going to
slash the red tape, but then notactually do it.
It's frustrating because there are states that do it.
(23:22):
And I think that's the part thatkills me about it because every
time you see a thing from Newsome of oh, we're going to
slash through a tape, you go, OK, well, maybe we're finally
going to fix it. Maybe San Francisco is going to
permit more than three homes this year, you know, but they
don't. And I think the most frustrating
thing is seeing that it's not happening, especially at such a
time of urgency, right? All the homes that were
destroyed and all the displaced families.
(23:42):
But what is heartening, though, is seen that other states are
doing it. And in that same van, I'm hoping
that California starts understanding that this is not
going to go away if we just keeplooking away, right?
It's not going to fix itself. Like the people are just going
to leave. And that's going to be the
solution. And that's not a good solution,
right? That is a solution for decline.
That is a solution for an end ofCalifornia supremacy, dominance
(24:05):
or just general growth, right? And so in the same bin, I want
to talk a little bit about the permit permitting bills than the
anti see, you're not anti sequa,but some of the more sequa
focused bills going into the California State Legislature.
Are you familiar at all with like, Buffy Wicks and her
permitting package? Yeah, I actually have an entire
rebuild piece out on that same package.
I was at Sacramento Day where the day they released that
(24:27):
paper, and I had no clue they were releasing it.
But just hearing her speak aboutit, I was like, Oh my God, I
have to go read this on the plane back home.
And just going through it was just a lot of like, yes, nodding
in my head. And it was just so excited to
know that there are politicians out there who are understanding
the vast need and how, as I mentioned before, it is
politically popular right now tosay you are going to stand up to
(24:47):
special interest groups and build.
But people don't do that. They say that girl election
seasons. They say that on podcasts.
But the second they are, you know, actually elected leaders,
it is very difficult to do that.So to hear an elected leader who
is not just trying to, you know,get a re election campaign, but
it's something that she's been working on for so long to
understand that she is going to get a lot of pushback from this,
(25:10):
but knows that the crisis is so dire that she is going to push
through was just incredibly inspiring to hear on my end.
And she actually has like a new,one of the recommendations that
came out of this report was likeending sequa for Sequa, by the
way, is California EnvironmentalQuality Act, which is kind of
been weaponized in building as of lay.
(25:31):
I have a tangent to add on afterthis.
But she has put a bill out to suspend that for infill housing,
which is just the build on top of areas that are just not
usable like piles of brick or just like condemned places,
which we should like we should not be delaying processes like
this, But not back to the weaponize AC weaponization of
Sequa. Karen Bass, I, I think it was
(25:53):
recent or maybe last year, said on a podcast, so like blatantly
how she knew that Sequa was a problem and she knew that
politicians were using it to their advantage to just put up,
no, we don't want to build this by saying that we weren't
denying things based on environmental factors, but how
they would impact the environment.
(26:13):
Basically the vibes. They were rejecting things based
on vibes and the law was allowing them to it's.
Unbelievable. Like the weaponization of like,
well, I guess the weaponization of such a like noble intent law,
right? Something that's that we're
going to protect the environment, right?
We also want to but like. Who?
Who doesn't? I would say, I presume both of
(26:35):
you read Mark J Dunkleman's Why Nothing Works and Who Killed
Progress? It's it's in that same vein of
just, you know, these these noble intent laws, like these
things that were made for a reason, right, you know, to rein
in the expansion of industry andthe pollution of the 60s and
70s, right are now being the problem, right.
We obviously the book calls a little bit more with the robot
(26:56):
and stuff, but I'm ignoring that.
But the main point being is thatthey're saying it out loud,
right Bass one on that podcast and just said it.
We used to stop housing and I think a lot about with these
like NIMBY or, you know, not my backyard coalition's.
Like you have environmentalists and then you have wealthy
homeowners and special interestsall on the same side.
And you kind of wonder it's like, OK, if all of you are
(27:17):
pointing at each other going, hey, we're on the same side.
Did you not think maybe something's not right here?
Right? You know, this idea of, oh,
we're going to not build this apartment complex because it's
going to change neighborhood characters Like that doesn't
seem to be a good idea, right? You're not stopping
gentrification. You're forcing all the families
who can't afford to live here. Ow, if anything, that's worse
actually. In fact, we could even argue you
are causing gentrification. Oh, sure.
I mean, I see this all the time in Vermont.
(27:39):
They they've gentrified huge parts of the state.
In the town I live in, in South Burlington, they're these like,
quote UN quote, habitat blocks. But like, they have no
ecological justification. They just like made them up and
put like a green sticker on it. But it was really just so that,
like some of the wealthiest people in the state don't have
to have their views change because, you know, they put
their house on this like nut houses online so they can see
(28:02):
like, like Champlain in One Direction and the mountains in
the other. And they just don't want that
view to change because it's a very pretty view.
But that's what they want is theview.
But you know, they, they know they're politically sensible
enough to know that if they say it was about animals instead of
their views, then like that, I'll take them further.
And so that's what they do is, is they do exclusionary politics
(28:26):
and wrap it in the language of environmentalism.
And it's very frustrating to watch.
Oh, sure. It's, it's it's even more
frustrating when especially being a young person, like I'm,
I'm 21, right? I've lived in Southern
California my whole life. And you know, you hear these
things, right? You hear them in passing.
You hear, you know, conservatives be like, oh, you
know, the people in LA, they want to make us all live in
boxes and put us in all little apartments.
(28:47):
You go, OK, well, I don't know if that's true, but OK,
whatever, right? You just take it and move on.
But then you hear the environment and say, oh, we got
to stop building this and you can't.
And eventually you think about it and you go, but why, why, Why
are we fighting this, this housing complex, you know?
Right, yeah. It's one of these things where
like, you know, obviously there's some places that are so
majestic, so ecologically sensitive, so important to the
(29:09):
environment. You you shouldn't build there.
But what's what's wrong is to use those kinds of arguments
where they don't make any sense.So again, some of the best
examples I'm familiar with are around me.
I've seen these kinds of environmental arguments used to
block housing behind the loads. Like like there's just like some
(29:29):
woods behind the Lowe's in SouthBurlington.
Why can't we build some housing?I did not realize what you meant
by Lowe's for a second. Then I'm like, oh, like Lowe's
like the. OK, yeah, like the store, like
the the home improvement store, there's a Lowe's, there's some
woods behind it. Some developers wanted to like
build some apartments in the woods behind the Lowe's.
(29:51):
And you would have thought that like Mount Rushmore was getting
spray painted the way that they acted like this would be
vandalism on the landscape. And it's like I just, I get very
frustrated with what are obviously disingenuous arguments
being thrown out because actually taking care of the
environment is important. Actually climate action is
(30:11):
important. And so it's just very, very
frustrating to watch nakedly badfaith arguments, you know, use
that. It's especially with the green
energy transition, you know, I, I think a lot about solar and
nuclear adopting all these climate friendly attack and then
energy production things. And it's like, like the solar
panels, I guess is a good example, right?
The solar panels in New York City that they're fighting in
(30:32):
like we're trying to transition our economy to a greener, more
climate friendly economy, but you're fighting solar panels on
the city, you know, or any sort of green energy, quite frankly.
And it's like it I, I, I like touse the example of the
permitting bill from Mansion Embarrass.
I want to say this was 2024 in the spring.
Yeah, I, I was Capitol Hill intern at the time.
(30:54):
And I remember getting rumors about the spill and reading
about it online. And it was again, I, I could, I
could be getting these numbers wrong, but I want to say it was
like a 2% increase or maybe 5% of, you know, carbon emissions
in exchange for like a 14% reduction of from what old solar
like and Electro all the other sorts of a green energy.
But of course the was it Sunrisemovement was there and just stop
(31:16):
oil. And of course the bill goes
nowhere. And it's, it's frustrating to
see the people not understand just this, this game theory
like, wait, there's option A andoption B And if you do nothing,
it's option A, right? It's it's very, very
frustrating. It's, it's the, it's just
basically the belief of just notunderstanding trade-offs when it
comes to advocates like that. Like I like to say, policy
(31:37):
politics and advocacy are not the same thing.
They would 100% intersect with one another.
But if you want to do advocacy and do advocacy, well, you're
going to have to understand yourpolicy and you're going to have
to understand the politics of your policy.
So climate activists always enter the issue or like the
problem with not understanding that they have to sow the seed
and understand why they should be getting people to understand
(32:01):
why their pet policy issue is the right one to do.
But instead they show up angry and they bully politicians until
a bill is set and then you were just left with nothing.
And with an issue like climate change itself, like doing
nothing is worse because the issue will continue to worsen.
Like prior to this job, I was working in carbon dioxide
(32:22):
removal technologies and community input there was
extremely difficult even workingin California.
And it's like, would you rather to just stop innovation to help,
you know, maintain and like lessen the worsening climate
issue, or would you rather just yell about it and then just
nothing happens and it just continues to get worse?
I. Think that can be applied to
(32:43):
pretty much any of the, well, ormaybe not any, but a decent
amount of the advocacy groups. I you spend enough time on
Capitol Hill, you kind of get the gist of, OK, there are some
people who are very serious and when they come in, they set real
polite and they have their binder and they explain to the
member exactly what their plan is and why it's important and
why they should support it. And then you have the people who
come in with the phones and the signs and you're like, OK, this
(33:04):
is going to be a fun afternoon. But all that to say, I, I love a
lot of Portuguese are saying pivot back to the housing 1
though actually this morning, mylast morning about six hours
ago, but I saw the mass timber renaissance piece from from you,
Gary, about the new home technology construction or not
to go out. Always say this again, new, new
ish housing construction technology, the mass timber, the
(33:27):
prefabricated timber production.Can you talk a little bit more
about that? I mean, obviously you have a
report on today too. Yeah.
So we, we did have a new report out today too at the rebuild.
It's the the mass timber Renaissance and you can also
find it at the Chamber of Progress website.
So Max Timber is a new building technology, which basically is
an engineered wood product such that you cross laminate timber
(33:50):
so that collectively those pieces are not much, much
stronger than individual lumber pieces.
OK. And there's a new technology.
The first mass timber building in the United States wasn't
until 2011 in Montana, really didn't take off into the last
four or five years. And it's it's got all kinds of
benefits. For one, it's a way of
(34:10):
increasing housing supply because it's great at the 6th
floor to 18th floor medium height area, because it's
stronger than conventional lumber.
It's got strength to weight ratios higher than steel and
concrete. And so it's great at that.
And it saves a lot of cost too, because you basically do a lot
(34:31):
of the fabrication off site and then you bring it to the
construction site. You basically put it together
like a Lego set. And so there's an example we use
in the report of a an apartment building that went up in less
than three months. They took on average nine days a
floor that is lightning comparedto a lot of other construction
(34:52):
because you're not having a way for concrete to cure.
There's all kinds of ways in which the building gets done
faster. And so that saves up cost, saves
on time, cost to capital. People love the look of mass
timber buildings. The exposed wood is something
people just love the aesthetics of.
So it's not like there's even like this trade off of like, oh,
it goes up fast, but it's like ugly.
No, no, it goes up fast and you like the way it looks and the
(35:16):
sequester's carbon. So it's a new technology, right?
Like what? We're a Chamber of progress.
We're people who love tech. I get excited about new
technologies. It's like where like progress
comes from. And so we had this report come
out on mass timber and what policy reforms can do to
accelerate the rollout. There's neaper reforms around
(35:37):
forest management. There's permitting reforms
around oversized loads. There's stuff we can do to beef
up the manufacturing. But people can go can go read
the report if they want. But there's policy reforms that
can help this new technology come out even faster and get the
benefits even sooner. So we're, yeah, we're really
excited about it. I say I love that.
It's like my favorite thing, of course, whenever you guys make a
(35:59):
new report is that the Chamber of Progress seems to understand
that like that tech and innovation is the driver of
productivity, right? That this tech, we can innovate
our way out of problems, right? We don't have to just accept
that there's this finite rule and that's it.
It's like, let's, let's get creative.
You know what, here's a problem,let's find a new way to fix it.
And I really think that's what'sbecoming this new dividing line
between, you know, people who are pragmatic about the
progressivism, right? I see a problem, I see that
(36:21):
housings are too expensive and let's find a way to make a
solution, even if it's not perfect.
Let's try six different solutions, right?
Versus let's just, you know, do rent control.
It's like that's not that's justnot helpful.
Yeah, but I want to say I want to pivot back into the rebuild
and we'll go ahead and start to wrap it up.
But with the rebuild, right, you've both listed out all these
different policy plans and different objectives and
(36:43):
different things about making Democrats deliver.
What do you see in the future asthe not path forward, but the
substantive policy agenda that we're going to run on?
Right. Obviously, it's still early and
it is still 2025 S like a lot ofthis is just hypothetical, but
if you were in charge, what is this new agenda we're running
on? You know, abundance is still
(37:05):
being formulated. So what is the specifics, right?
Do you see a specific plan or isit just we're making costs come
down and that's it? Like what?
I think when it comes to runningon a specific policy plan,
you're not going to win in the realm of politics because you
have to have a message that people can actually believe in.
(37:25):
Like if you go back to the previous campaign, Trump didn't
have a specific policy plan outside of Project 2025, and you
asked him for plans. He said he had concepts of a
plan. What he sold was nostalgia.
And he did that well. And it's something conservatives
love to do for like, we can go back to the tariffs he kept
talking about. We want to go back to the period
(37:46):
before the Great Depression and so forth.
They just love selling nostalgiaand it really plays out with
their base. We are obviously always going to
push policy agendas that Democrats should focus on.
Gary had one that just came out a couple months ago as a road
map for Dems and they navigate next one to two years.
But in terms of the future campaign, I would suggest for
Democrats to stay focused on a future forward message.
(38:09):
We are only 5% into a Trump presidency and the negative
impacts will be compounding and long withstanding for some time
where he has just kind of, in myoptimistic view, hinted us the
2026 midterm elections. And I think Democrats will do
well by offering not just a pathforward, but an alternative.
(38:29):
We can't just be the blame partyanymore.
A lot of people on the very far left do well with their base
because there's always somethingto critique, especially on
digital platforms like algorithms run on
counterculture. They love that.
But if you were going to talk tothe average person who just is
not online, no one wants to be yelled at all the time.
(38:50):
No, like people are tired of a resistance party and we lost a
lot of political willpower there.
So they do want to have politicians who have easy to
understand policy agendas. Like Kamala said 80 times over,
she had every single economist on her side and that still was
not enough for people. JD Vance and the other side was
(39:11):
saying, when it comes to housing, immigrants are stealing
your house. And that's why you should vote
for us because we'll protect it from you.
You have to say no, we want to build more housing so that
everyone is able to have a more stable and abundant future.
Everyone will be able to get paid a wage that they deserve.
And you have to counter that with an example and with like,
(39:31):
and I would say a lens. And I again, people gave so much
Flack for Derek and Ezra for coming out with the lens instead
of a policy agenda. But I understand it was kind of
like an abundance one O 1 book. You can't just give people all
of these policies and say here, this will help save America.
We're going to be like says who says the experts trust and
institutions have gone down. You can't just build trust by
(39:54):
that. Again, we need a new playbook.
I mean, Speaking of a new playbook, I would just say that
Democrats are naturally the party of ambition and change and
hopeful optimism, right? Like the most successful
Democrat in generations literally ran on a message of
(40:15):
hope and change. Like we can actually be
successful doing that. People.
A lot of people would like to believe that America's best days
are ahead of it and that their own finances best days are ahead
of it. And that we can bring costs down
and that we can have great jobs.And then we can have this like,
really awesome bright future. And that requires reform, right?
(40:37):
Like you're not going to get a future that's brighter than
today without reforming the status quo.
And so there is a reform to it. And and so that is what I would
would argue Democrats should lean into.
You know, and reform is different from radicalism.
This is one of the other things that I would say is like,
(40:58):
whereas like Trump wants to takeyou back 50 years and the far
left wants to like, burn it all down.
Like, actually, the right lane is use reform or we're going to
make things better, but we're not trying to do the French
Revolution. Like, we're not extremists, but
we do want to make change. It's a thing of we want to make
your life better, not worse. We're not going back 100 years,
(41:20):
right? Just just, I, I want you to have
a home that's big and cheap and not $1,000,000, right?
I want you to have energy bills that don't make you want to cry.
I, I want you to go to the grocery store and not like feel
like you're going to have a panic attack.
Really kind of strange world we're living in.
We're like, that seems to be like the outlandish thing to
say. That's the.
Uncool position. I'm like, what are you talking
(41:41):
about? That's like the coolest thing
there is. It's like making people's lives
better. It's the uncool position online.
I mean, like like I said, like it it it is just a feeds fire to
save these outlandish statementsonline because like that's how
you build an account and how youbuild a base.
And I think it was split ticket who had a piece that came out on
(42:02):
how people who do as politicianswho do very well online
typically don't do well like in the actual campaign and tend to
lose. And you have to, it made me like
take a step back and like, you have to understand, like if
specific sort of people on the Internet are rallying for one
specific idea, think to yourself, if I just went to my
neighbor and brought this idea to them, what would their
(42:22):
response be? If I went to some random person
down the street, I wouldn't evensay down the street.
I live in LA, middle America. And ask them about that same
policy. They might have a completely
different outlook than I do. It's like the, I would say like
the ultimate, like sampling error.
Yeah, ultimate sampling error. Like you're taking everything
you see online just because our little monkey brain isn't able
to distinguish like the little screen of what people say versus
(42:45):
what human being says. You know, really is quite
interesting because I think especially being a young person,
obviously I spent a lot of time around college students who we
spend a lot of time online as, as, as college students do.
A lot of people tend to follow into this.
It's like a group thing. But again, think they said that
radicalism of just, oh, this is this or it's this.
And there's no, you know, there's no reasonable discussion
(43:06):
of like, what is the plan or like, what are we actually
fighting for? It's usually just all or
nothing. And you're like, OK, well, this
is. They completely agree.
It reminds me of that meme that went around from like Gen.
Z1 and Gen. Z2.
I'm definitely Gen. Z.
And because I grew up with like Tumblr, like I remember like the
second Obama announcement, like I went on Tumblr that X morning
(43:26):
to find out results. And it's like growing up one
being online. And then I went to a very, very
leftist college and I was studying political science and
public policy. And all I knew were like these
internships. But at the same time, I also
work customer service shop sinceI was like 14 and I have a
family. I'm a first generation, an
American. I have a family who has no
connection to politics, no interest in politics at all.
(43:47):
And they were just trying to make a living for themselves.
So sometimes I find myself as a way to like check myself.
If I think I am getting a littlebit too into the weeds or
something, I'll like just like drop an idea of my family group
chat to see what they think because like, they are more than
happy to disagree with me. But it's also good that I check
myself. And I just don't find myself
like, yes, yes, yes, all of the time because we're just going to
(44:08):
continue getting into the weeds and we end up with the result
that no one outside of us might agree with.
I got to say I love that. I, I feel the same way.
It's like I, I, I was not very political, but I have an uncle
who does not use the Internet in2025 and still has a flip phone.
So when I, when I think about stuff, I'm like, let me, let me
see what my uncle Steve thinks about this.
And I would say if you're listening, but he doesn't have
(44:28):
Internet, so he won't be listening.
I ask him and he goes, well, it seems like a pretty good idea.
Or, you know, no, there's just such a simple like nature to it.
But just for context, I want to mention to the audience that the
the Gen. Z difference tends to be Gen.
Z1 is like the pre COVID, like graduating high school, like
going into young adulthood pre COVID and Gen.
Z2 is the post COVID, you know, TikTok, Snapchat, the Internet
(44:50):
generation which there is a hugedivergent.
Yeah, I think Gen. Z1 is even older.
So like I graduated in 2020 for college.
So that's when like you fully finished school.
Like we were entering adulthood as like COVID fully started and
it's just like, oh wow, OK, American Dream lasted.
Oh yeah, well, it is quite shocking just because like it's
weird that this is Nexus point of just COVID right, but for a
(45:12):
generation right of you know, 1020 years from 2000 onward,
right, Obviously you being on the further side of Gen.
Z1, but I'm I got the cusp of Gen.
Z1 right, like my little brotherwho's two years younger is Gen.
Z2 like he doesn't text normallyhe's on to talk all the time and
Snapchat. I'm like I what the hell
happened? How did?
Oh my God, speaking to my niecesis like the scariest thing ever.
(45:33):
Scary. The lingo you don't understand.
It I'm just laughing at you too,because I'm not part of any part
of Gen. Z.
And yet as a college professor, I've seen all of these like come
through as my students, right? So I've definitely seen like, I,
you see the cultural changes from like the people I first had
when I first started teaching inlike 2018 through COVID and then
(45:54):
COVID and then post that. And so it's just, it's, it's
funny how you do see a shifts like between the students.
And so it's just it's yes, thereis definitely a Gen.
Z12 thing for sure. 100% a lot of it comes down to I mean, I
hate it to be like this Mr. Gen.Z or but like it's it's the
screens, you know, it's it's theInternet, it's the tick tock,
it's the it's terrifying. I will say it's like that like
(46:16):
that. I like to think that social
media and these kind of things are going to be the at least our
generations lead paint, the kindof thing where it's like it just
kind of cooked our brains, but. Well, so I, I think, you know,
some of it's just cultural. I think so, like, at this point,
it would be not just like against the rules, but like
culturally weird and rude to light up a cigarette in a
restaurant. You just wouldn't do it.
(46:39):
Like everybody would look aroundat you.
Like, what kind of jerk are you smoking a cigarette next to me
eating dinner? And I think there's going to
need to be some like cultural norms push back on like when it
is or is it OK to like use your phone?
Like I'm, you know, old comparedto you guys.
And so like, we did not, you know, we did not have
(47:01):
smartphones when I was in college, but more basic phones.
And one of the things that I will see people do sometimes is
like have their phone out like at a restaurant when they should
be talking to people. And I'm like, yeah, that's,
that's the cultural stuff where we, you know, government's not
going to do that for us. We just got to have a like a re
orientation of our culture away from like phone study people.
(47:24):
Yeah. Sounds like it sounds like we're
calling for a rebuild and a reorientation and a
restructuring all in one go. Sounds like we use a redo.
Yeah, a reform, a redo. As my dad like used to say, we
need a Mulligan, we need to do over.
But this has been the Chamber ofprogress.
Tara Jari and Gary Winslet, thank you so much for joining me
today. Thank.
You for having us. Today I'm progressive.
(47:46):
We got the chat with the Chamberof Progresses, Tara Jarrari and
Gary Winslet. Tara is the Director of Economic
Analysis and a rising star in the world public policy.
Tara was previously with the Nick Scannon Center working on
social policy to upload God Damnit.
Today on Progressive. We got the chat with the Chamber
of Progresses, Tara Derari and Gary Winslet.
Tara is the Director of EconomicAnalysis and a rising star in
(48:07):
the world of public policy. Tara was previously with the
Nice Cannon Center working on social policy to uplift lower
and middle class families. Gary is an assistant professor
in the political Science department and the International
Politics and Economics program at Middlebury College where he
has taught since 2018. His first book, Competitiveness,
Death, Trade, Politics in the Cars, Beef, and Drugs, analyzes
the politics surrounding regulatory trade barriers in the
(48:29):
auto, meat, and pharmaceutical sectors.
The two of them are currently launching an incredible new
blog, The Rebuild, focusing on how Democrats can build more
lower costs. And one again.
Check it out.
Today on Progressive, we get to chat with the Chamber of
Progress is Tahara Jarry and Gary Winslet.
Tara is the Director of EconomicAnalysis and a rising star in
the world of public policy. Gary is an assistant professor
in the Political Science department and the International
Politics and Economics program at Middlebury College, where he
has taught since 2018. The two of them are currently
launching an incredible new blog, The Rebuild, focusing on
(00:20):
how Democrats can build more lower costs and win again.
All right, Tara, Gary, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having. Us nice to be here with you.
I mean, I gotta say, it is quitean honor.
After you guys launched the the rebuild, I remember seeing that
post come up and I was like, oh,I gotta read into this.
But obviously as director of Econ analysis and Gary hadn't
(00:42):
written books on trade and politics, I wanted to talk to
you both about the tariffs the president announced yesterday,
the blanket long-awaited tariffs.
Obviously it's been, I want to say a shit show is the right way
to say it, but can you talk a little bit more about what these
tariffs actually mean for trade for people, for especially
people like me, like young men? Obviously it's trade with China,
(01:05):
it's electronic goods, but can you build on that a little bit?
Yeah, Tara, do you want to go first?
Yeah, I was just going to say I think the academic term is
should show just from seeing just the lack of cohesiveness
with this rollout. I mean, even today you have
people in the admin saying that this is a negotiation tactic.
Even Trump's son put a couple tweets about that.
(01:27):
And then you have the actual White House itself saying that
they are not backing down here and this is just accumulation of
how the entire tariff policy hasbeen in the Trump admin.
It's where they say they are going to do one thing they make
a big spectacle of and then theyfail to communicate whether this
is actually going to be a permanent standing issue or if
it's something that they're justlike dangling in front of the
(01:47):
carrots other people. But as you mentioned, yes, we
have reciprocal tariffs, though I would not call them that.
They aren't really tit for tat. A lot of this are quite uneven.
I'm sure you even saw the islandcalled McDonald Island which has
no residence was even tariff as well.
So it just kind of makes no sense as to how they're doing
this, but how it impacts the broader ecosystem including jobs
(02:10):
for everyone. I would say the uncertainty
right now is taking the forefront for a lot of
companies. Some companies are hoping to get
exempted from this but they're not sure if they're able to.
Others are wait and see if they should pull it out or not.
Like, for example, we had the Nintendo released yesterday
where people were wondering whatthe price is going to be.
And that just should not be the case.
We should not be, you know, holding our breath every second,
(02:30):
every time something gets released to understand like, OK,
how much is the consumer going to be upholding a lot of this
cost? Yeah.
I mean the, the, the what I would add to that is just that
this is obviously going to be really bad for consumers, right?
Consumers are the people who ultimately end up paying that
tax on the imports. And you may not see that like
literally this afternoon becausethe stuff on the shelf wasn't
(02:51):
tariff, but you're definitely going to see price increases by
the end of this quarter, by quarter three.
That's going to, that's raising prices for people, that's taking
money out of your pocket. One of the estimates I saw
earlier today is that the middle50% household like end up paying
between 3000 and $3500 more overthe course of the year for
(03:11):
these. That's a lot of money.
That's like multiple paychecks for a lot of people.
You know, that's, that's just that's a lot of money to be
taking out of people's pockets. And the other thing a lot of
people don't think about is thattariffs aren't just bad for
consumers, bad for workers because they raise the price of
inputs. So if you are a car
(03:33):
manufacturer, raising the price of steel and aluminum is driving
up the cost of making that. And so that makes that American
made car less competitive internationally and it makes it
less attractive for the buyer domestically.
And so it actually hurts manufacturing jobs.
So even the things that supposedly get helped actually
get hurt by these. All right, I was going to say,
(03:54):
I, I think a really good exampleof this was the Bush steel
tariffs. I'm sure you've all seen that
paper where it's remember correctly, it was like for every
one job save, it passed along like $900,000 in cost, something
like that. Yeah.
So, so I know the Bush steel tariffs super well because my
dad actually worked in a steel processing facility.
And so they, they hated the Bushsteel tariffs because they were
not people who like, he literally wore a hard hat at his
(04:17):
job. He was one of these people who
like political ads get made about high school educated work
in Birmingham, AL. And, you know, they imported raw
steel and then they did the higher value added, which is
they turn that raw steel into specialized pieces of steel that
all kinds of other higher end manufacturing firms needed.
(04:39):
Right. Like that's the thing you can
actually like have decent wages at, you know, that they're not
good wages in like literal raw steel production.
The margins are too low. But you can do advanced steel
processing and you can pay decent working class wages doing
that. Well, OK.
But then if you pay off all the imported steel, that actually
hurts people who work in that steel processing.
(05:01):
So yeah, I'm, I'm very familiar with how some of these things
work in in the steel industry. I would like to read a quote
from the Tax Foundation where they have it placed on like it's
just like blue graphic and it's just easy to read.
And this is something I always recommend.
You're communicating the impactsof tariff policy, but just
tariffs or taxes. The effects of higher steel
prices, largely a result of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, led to
(05:22):
a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs inthe steel consuming sector, a
loss larger than the total employment in the steel
producing sector at the time. And that's on one sector and
it's a pretty narrow tariff compared to all of the sweeping
stuff we got yesterday. Wow.
You know, it's just one of thosethings where you think like I,
(05:45):
why? Like, I guess I, I, that's the
thing I can't really seem to wrap my head around, right.
The whole rationale is we're going to bring jobs back, we're
going to bring manufacturing back.
It's like, that's OK, sure, but it seems to be pretty clear that
that's not going to help. And I guess what?
What is the restaurant? I can tell you what's going on
here. Imagine a castle, right?
And you're the gatekeeper at thecastle and you are just super
(06:08):
cynical and super greedy. What you want to do is you want
to make sure that the gate you keep is the only gate in and out
of the castle so that you can then charge however much you
want. What the Trump administration is
doing is erecting these super high tariff barriers and trade
walls so that then they can punch little holes in the wall,
(06:29):
which are these exemptions that they're going to give out.
And you can force businesses andwhole sectors even to come
begging before you. Trump loves nothing more than to
force people to come kiss the ring.
And so that's part of what this is about is forcing the kissing
of the ring. But there's also a second part
of it, which is that they just like cronyism, and they kind of
(06:50):
like a certain authoritarian cronyism.
For years, the political right in the United States has been in
love with Hungary. What does Orban do?
Orban makes it so that in order to prosper as a business in
Hungarian society, you have to be on the same side as the
government politically. You cannot succeed as a
Hungarian business if you are not friends with the Orban
(07:13):
administration. That is what they would like to
copy paste in the United States.The only way to succeed in
business is to be part of Trump's friend circle.
It's the Trump welfare standard.I also think what Tim Walls was
saying yesterday is that I'm trying to understand these
tariffs and typical admins. You would have the methodology
(07:34):
behind it and it would make sense.
But for this certain aspect, youhave to have a little bit of a
psychology degree to understand what he is thinking that leads
him to get here because it's just like, it's honestly
economically illiterate. And it does not make sense if
you go from the logic route. So you have to like, go back to
who Trump is as a person and follow the steps there.
(07:55):
And like, a lot of it kind of boils down to he's like the he's
weirdly just a really big William McKinley fan.
His his fan favorite right, the president from the 1890s big
tariff guy. Was it the not minor reduction,
but the conquering all of the Western Hemisphere type?
Or was it the isolation? I just all of it's just bad,
(08:16):
right? But I like your point of the
psychological part because none of this makes sense, you know?
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm a PhD in econ, but
if I can understand it, something's really wrong, right?
I'm sure you both saw the math they used to calculate the
tariffs, and last I checked throwing in a bunch of Greek
letters and saying this is our formula and then multiplying 4
(08:37):
by 1/4, that's not. I don't think the thought is
supposed to work. Just throwing that out there.
No, I actually felt really bad for that comms person.
I was like. Well, the other thing too is
just like assuming that all non tariff barriers are
discriminatory is wrong. And like it just so happens
there's somebody who wrote a book on regulatory trade
(08:58):
barriers and it's me. And like that's wrong.
Like they could have just calledme and been like, are these a
form of trade discrimination? And I could have very clearly
explained to them that that is not true, that there are all
kinds of regulatory trade barriers that, I mean, are a few
of them discriminatory? Sure.
Can some of them be absolute? And, you know, the USTR should
(09:20):
fight them where they are. But just this blanket assumption
that every non tariff barrier amounts to discrimination, it's
just nutty. This is kind of a good point to
pivot, seeing as how they could have called you right, both of
you, you know, both of you are the experts, right?
They could have called you how to how to fix these things,
these things that they were elected on, you know, bringing
down costs, which it seems to melike that's gone out the window,
(09:42):
but they could have called experts.
And so so in that vein, I kind of want to pivot a little bit to
the rebuild and the Chamber of progresses work right?
You, I've seen a lot about, well, almost on every page about
making Democrats build and work kind of that general vibe, not
trying to get copyrighted, but the general vibe of just making
(10:04):
it work. And that seems to me what they
were saying they were going to do.
We're going to make these costs come down, going to fix the
housing fix, you know, cost of living, but your institute is
what actually doing that work. Can you tell me a little bit
more about the work at the rebuild and what separates you
from this obviously cronyism, but what the actual substantive
work you're doing to make these things real?
(10:26):
Yeah, I like to. So you see, like a lot of this
sometimes correlates with like the abundance framework.
And you see Ezra Klein, he like likes to make the joke a lot of
dark abundance and how Trump went into this presidency saying
that he is, you know, it's the golden age, golden abundance
seem like synonymous to one another.
So you have like high hopes. And again, like the incumbents
(10:47):
of the Democratic Party just were at a loss.
We were facing high prices, which this Admiral soon learn
the same lesson. And when you have someone come
saying I am going to offer you adifferent way, it's easy to see
why a swing voter might believe that, especially when you sadly
had the candidate who was sayingthey weren't going to do
anything otherwise or different than the current incumbent
(11:08):
president. And then you go on and you see
that a lot of this was just an ego game for Trump.
He just kind of wanted to repay a lot of the people who have
betrayed him previously. And he is just not interested in
governing and governing well, I like to always use the example
of the CHIPS Act because if you were someone who really wanted
to revitalize manufacturing industry, you would be looking
(11:32):
at a lot of bipartisan programs like the CHIPS Act.
But he had a major issue with the allocation process, which is
why it was very entailed with the DEI processes.
He wasn't a fan of that. Some people can find that
understandable. If it's very hard to allocate
the program that you want to make work, that's fine.
Logical solution would be to reform the allocation process.
But for him, he would rather just repeal it and throw tariffs
(11:55):
every. And it just shows there's no
interest in building up. But right now, Democrats instead
are in a different playing fieldwhere we are the losers.
Right now, we don't have a majority.
And we have a lot of, you know, self reflection to understand
where we went wrong, which is the number one thing that we
pointed out at the rebuild. What Democrats got wrong, which
(12:16):
is a lot of it was falling into process instead of focusing on
progress and how we can build from there.
And we think a #1 issue of that is going to be the cost of
living. Trump got very tired about
talking to the cost of living early on.
He even made the joke yesterday that talking about groceries in
the department itself is old fashioned, which shows how out
of touch he is working in this admin.
(12:37):
But it's not out of touch for the average person.
You look at your grocery cart, you look online every time you
want to buy something. Tariffs are going to make that
even worse. It's just going to be brought to
the front of your eye and it's something you can't turn away
from. So this is where Democrats
should be leaning into. Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those thingswhere I love all of what you're
saying, but I want to boil a little bit more of what we're
(12:59):
leaning into. Obviously abundance, you know,
came out and saw a lot of, I would say fanfare, but a lot of
like pushback of the anti monopolist.
But being the losing party, right, being out of power means
a lot of self reflection and looking at what went wrong.
I'm sure you've both read a lot of like Matthew Iglesias and his
stuff mentioning about how the previous administration was very
against some of the more supply side reforms.
And it seems to me that a lot ofthis abundance agenda or just
(13:22):
cost of living agenda really comes down to more.
Can you talk a little bit more about what the rebuilding
specific what you guys are doingso about more right?
Yeah. So one of the things we're doing
is we're trying to rebuild the Democratic Party in a more
supply oriented direction. Like we're not opposed to the
social safety net. We think the social safety net
is great, but you can't redistribute your way out of a
(13:45):
shortage if there are too few houses.
What you need to do is build more housing, and then that
actually helps your social safety net because Section 8
vouchers, for example, go a lot further in a context of housing
abundance over housing shortage.And for too long, Democrats got
stuck in this idea that you could tax and redistribute and
(14:07):
subsidized your way out of all economic problems.
Well, a lot of our problems actually have supply constraints
right now in in really negative ways.
Housing is the most obvious one,but it's not just housing.
We don't have enough doctors, and that's because of the
residency camp. We don't have enough electricity
transmission lines. And so that means that the solar
(14:27):
energy you can create in places like Arizona and Nevada can't
get too often where it's needed,right?
We don't have enough of a lot ofthese things.
And so if we want a more prosperous society, we actually
have to have more. And the other thing that's
really, really important about that is more benefits to people
at the bottom of the most, right?
(14:49):
So like, my favorite analogy is like musical chairs.
So if you think about musical chairs, it's fun game in 3rd
grade because there's like not quite enough chairs for the kids
that they got to fight over it. But like, that's not what you
want in American political economy.
What you want is so many chairs that even the kid with a bum
ankle has a chair. No problem, right?
Like you want a chair for everybody in American Society.
(15:12):
And so that's what we're doing is trying to rebuild the
Democratic Party. Any more economically
intelligent, supply oriented direction, because that's what's
ultimately going to reduce the cost of living.
And then when we govern in ways that that reduce the cost of
living and are effective, we canturn around to voters and say we
govern. Well, This is why you should
(15:33):
vote for us instead of Trump's madness.
I can say I love the the chairs analogy out if I remember
correctly, was that lifted almost directly from abundance.
The mention that or I want to say I heard.
That one. So it's been in YIMBY circles
for years, and there's actually good research on this done by
people like Chris Elmendorf. So there's actually like a lot
(15:54):
of research. As with so much in abundance,
much of its intellectual tentacles reach back to YIMBY.
Oh, yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that just because I
remember Elmendorf was the UC Davis professor, right, Chris
Elmendorf. It's funny hearing like all
these things wrapped together. But the thing with the music of
chairs, right? I want to say that was in
reference to housing, Like statecities that build the most
housing and have the most, of course, subsequent
(16:14):
affordability, have the lowest amounts of homelessness.
And when you put all that together, it kind of makes
sense. But I want to backtrack a little
bit because there's something that you've written a lot about
about monopolies and obviously abundance got a lot of Flack for
the Zephyr teach out and the whole like, Oh, we can just, you
know, anti monopoly our way out of these things and we can
redistribute the the wealth and then take it from these other
(16:35):
guys and just not seeming to understand that the point is
that there isn't enough and thatwe can just have more.
So you would read about real anti monopolists.
And so would you expand a littlebit more about that?
Sure, last week I had a piece titled with a real anti
monopolist, Please stand up because a lot of the people who
brand themselves as anti monopolist were, you know, they
had all these critiques of abundance that it doesn't go
(16:56):
after corporate concentration. And one of the things that I was
pointing out is that things likeso real page is a software that
uses algorithms to help propertyowner set prices.
And so this is something that a lot of the anti monopolist for
open arms about in terms of housing be like it's real
baseball. Look, if anybody, if anybody at
(17:17):
real page or who used real page was breaking the law, they
should absolutely be prosecuted.But even the highest estimates
of real pages impact is like only in certain markets.
And it was about $50.00 a month,which is not nothing.
But that's not the main driver of high housing cost, right?
The main driver of high housing cost is too few homes.
(17:39):
And a lot of the way when you build more homes, what that
actually does is it reduces the market power of these
corporations who own lots of apartment units, right?
Like the way to weaken their leverage is to have lots of
supply. And so like more supply is the
real anti monopoly. And you can see this in all
kinds of other areas like certificate of need laws in
(18:00):
healthcare. Many states have these laws and
they are bananas. They literally say that in order
to provide a new medical service, you have to go before a
board and prove that there's a need for the service.
But in the vast majority of cases, your competitors get to
also come before the board and argue that no, no, actually
(18:20):
there's no need. So like, imagine if you wanted
to like set up a new like Mexican restaurant and you had
to go for a board and get like anew Mexican restaurant
certificate of need license, butall the other Mexican
restaurants got to show up and like fight your ability to open.
That's crazy. And that happens in healthcare
(18:41):
in in over half of states. In state of North Carolina,
nearly 20 different medical services are governed under
certificate of need laws. We have good research that shows
that these laws drive up healthcare costs and drive down
healthcare access, particularly in rural settings.
Getting rid of those, that's real anti monopoly.
(19:01):
That's part of abundance. That's part of what we've
written about as part of our cost of living agenda.
Like that's going to be the trueanti monopoly politics.
I think a lot of that has to do with, well, not a lot has to do,
but I think a lot of that addresses those core issues,
right? The things that people talk
about, people complain that Healthcare is too expensive and
then they go, oh, well, that's why we need Medicare for All or
(19:24):
housing too expensive. That's why we need public
housing or the rent control. And so God, geez.
OK, so you're putting a Band-Aidover a bullet hole.
That's not what we're looking for.
In that same vein, I want to go back to the housing part and the
mention of the Mexican restaurant analogy.
I think a lot of that is almost,well, one to one with housing.
And I would say Target, you're from California, right?
Or living Los Angeles. I'm originally from New York
(19:46):
City, but I do live in LA, yeah.And so you're plenty familiar
with obviously the Palisades fire and all the homes that are
lost that are now caught in permitting help.
And so in that same thing, I want to talk a little bit about
the rebuild and moreover the Chamber of Progress that your
proposed agenda for fixing thesethings.
I saw that you had written aboutan Operation Warp Speed for
California after the OR Los Angeles, more importantly after
the Palisades. Did you speak a little bit about
(20:07):
that? Yeah, so it was an insane time
just because again, I am from the East Coast, so I've never
witnessed a fire of this size before, especially not one that
I could just look outside my window and see.
So we were literally trapped in the house for a week and I'm
just over here thinking about like how long it is going to
take to build here. So I am in like my mid to late
(20:28):
20s right now. I am not at the house buying age
yet, but I will be soon. And when we do buy, we would
like it to be in California. But seeing the fire happened in
Pacific Palisades and Alameda toyou in Pasadena, you now have
affluent displaced refugees entering already a constrained
housing market in Los Angeles. It is going to be a bloodbath to
(20:53):
try and buy housing here and also just being familiar with
the housing codes and the over reliance on local input in
places like Los Angeles, as wellas the very exclusionary zoning
laws that make it so difficult to put any type of housing
outside of just a single family home in Los Angeles was
(21:15):
extremely worrying to think about.
We've already seen in the past week or so, it was only four
permits that have been allowed thus far since the fires have
happened. And I was watching this on the
news, a local channel as well. Also shout out to local news
throughout this time. They they were amazing.
They were killing it and they were asking them for the context
of this. They were like 4 like that
sounds like such a low number. What is this?
(21:37):
And they're like, well, if you look at the outskope of how
California typically does handout permits, this does make
sense. And it's incredibly frustrating
when you have politicians who use now this politically popular
abundance, like lingo, includinglike slashing red tape, building
more, doing it fast. And you had Newsome capitalize
on that quite a bit. For example, he said, we are
(22:00):
going to remove like the timelines, we're going to build
fast. And now and then you click on
the bill page and you see, what's that little thing there?
Oh, it's a 10% cap. That means, sure, you can build
faster in the same area where wedon't even know if it's
environmentally safe to continuebuilding there.
And you can just build a slightly larger mansion.
(22:21):
Who is that going to help when the housing market is already so
strained, where people are already feeling they have to
bleed out? And why you are seeing record
numbers of people leaving California, but only the same
rich people can build the same houses, just slightly larger.
So it was just incredibly frustrating to hear them just
act as if they are doing the right thing.
They are now the new politicians.
(22:41):
Newsom went on a a podcast with Ezra Klein and he just had
again, all these work around answers.
And it's, it's just as someone who lives here and plans to
continue living here, you think about the younger generations
who are going to continue entering this market and just
feel like there's no way to be here.
And what's the logical solution for them to not live here?
(23:02):
Right, Well, I mean, I take it from someone who's been born and
raised in California, it's like you watch friends and families
move away because affordability and it isn't anything more than
that because people love the weather, the culture, the jobs
that you name it, whatever it is, they love it, but it's the
affordability. And so seeing like a lot of
these Co opted versions of abundance or we're going to
slash the red tape, but then notactually do it.
It's frustrating because there are states that do it.
(23:22):
And I think that's the part thatkills me about it because every
time you see a thing from Newsome of oh, we're going to
slash through a tape, you go, OK, well, maybe we're finally
going to fix it. Maybe San Francisco is going to
permit more than three homes this year, you know, but they
don't. And I think the most frustrating
thing is seeing that it's not happening, especially at such a
time of urgency, right? All the homes that were
destroyed and all the displaced families.
(23:42):
But what is heartening, though, is seen that other states are
doing it. And in that same van, I'm hoping
that California starts understanding that this is not
going to go away if we just keeplooking away, right?
It's not going to fix itself. Like the people are just going
to leave. And that's going to be the
solution. And that's not a good solution,
right? That is a solution for decline.
That is a solution for an end ofCalifornia supremacy, dominance
(24:05):
or just general growth, right? And so in the same bin, I want
to talk a little bit about the permit permitting bills than the
anti see, you're not anti sequa,but some of the more sequa
focused bills going into the California State Legislature.
Are you familiar at all with like, Buffy Wicks and her
permitting package? Yeah, I actually have an entire
rebuild piece out on that same package.
I was at Sacramento Day where the day they released that
(24:27):
paper, and I had no clue they were releasing it.
But just hearing her speak aboutit, I was like, Oh my God, I
have to go read this on the plane back home.
And just going through it was just a lot of like, yes, nodding
in my head. And it was just so excited to
know that there are politicians out there who are understanding
the vast need and how, as I mentioned before, it is
politically popular right now tosay you are going to stand up to
(24:47):
special interest groups and build.
But people don't do that. They say that girl election
seasons. They say that on podcasts.
But the second they are, you know, actually elected leaders,
it is very difficult to do that.So to hear an elected leader who
is not just trying to, you know,get a re election campaign, but
it's something that she's been working on for so long to
understand that she is going to get a lot of pushback from this,
(25:10):
but knows that the crisis is so dire that she is going to push
through was just incredibly inspiring to hear on my end.
And she actually has like a new,one of the recommendations that
came out of this report was likeending sequa for Sequa, by the
way, is California EnvironmentalQuality Act, which is kind of
been weaponized in building as of lay.
(25:31):
I have a tangent to add on afterthis.
But she has put a bill out to suspend that for infill housing,
which is just the build on top of areas that are just not
usable like piles of brick or just like condemned places,
which we should like we should not be delaying processes like
this, But not back to the weaponize AC weaponization of
Sequa. Karen Bass, I, I think it was
(25:53):
recent or maybe last year, said on a podcast, so like blatantly
how she knew that Sequa was a problem and she knew that
politicians were using it to their advantage to just put up,
no, we don't want to build this by saying that we weren't
denying things based on environmental factors, but how
they would impact the environment.
(26:13):
Basically the vibes. They were rejecting things based
on vibes and the law was allowing them to it's.
Unbelievable. Like the weaponization of like,
well, I guess the weaponization of such a like noble intent law,
right? Something that's that we're
going to protect the environment, right?
We also want to but like. Who?
Who doesn't? I would say, I presume both of
(26:35):
you read Mark J Dunkleman's Why Nothing Works and Who Killed
Progress? It's it's in that same vein of
just, you know, these these noble intent laws, like these
things that were made for a reason, right, you know, to rein
in the expansion of industry andthe pollution of the 60s and
70s, right are now being the problem, right.
We obviously the book calls a little bit more with the robot
(26:56):
and stuff, but I'm ignoring that.
But the main point being is thatthey're saying it out loud,
right Bass one on that podcast and just said it.
We used to stop housing and I think a lot about with these
like NIMBY or, you know, not my backyard coalition's.
Like you have environmentalists and then you have wealthy
homeowners and special interestsall on the same side.
And you kind of wonder it's like, OK, if all of you are
(27:17):
pointing at each other going, hey, we're on the same side.
Did you not think maybe something's not right here?
Right? You know, this idea of, oh,
we're going to not build this apartment complex because it's
going to change neighborhood characters Like that doesn't
seem to be a good idea, right? You're not stopping
gentrification. You're forcing all the families
who can't afford to live here. Ow, if anything, that's worse
actually. In fact, we could even argue you
are causing gentrification. Oh, sure.
I mean, I see this all the time in Vermont.
(27:39):
They they've gentrified huge parts of the state.
In the town I live in, in South Burlington, they're these like,
quote UN quote, habitat blocks. But like, they have no
ecological justification. They just like made them up and
put like a green sticker on it. But it was really just so that,
like some of the wealthiest people in the state don't have
to have their views change because, you know, they put
their house on this like nut houses online so they can see
(28:02):
like, like Champlain in One Direction and the mountains in
the other. And they just don't want that
view to change because it's a very pretty view.
But that's what they want is theview.
But you know, they, they know they're politically sensible
enough to know that if they say it was about animals instead of
their views, then like that, I'll take them further.
And so that's what they do is, is they do exclusionary politics
(28:26):
and wrap it in the language of environmentalism.
And it's very frustrating to watch.
Oh, sure. It's, it's it's even more
frustrating when especially being a young person, like I'm,
I'm 21, right? I've lived in Southern
California my whole life. And you know, you hear these
things, right? You hear them in passing.
You hear, you know, conservatives be like, oh, you
know, the people in LA, they want to make us all live in
boxes and put us in all little apartments.
(28:47):
You go, OK, well, I don't know if that's true, but OK,
whatever, right? You just take it and move on.
But then you hear the environment and say, oh, we got
to stop building this and you can't.
And eventually you think about it and you go, but why, why, Why
are we fighting this, this housing complex, you know?
Right, yeah. It's one of these things where
like, you know, obviously there's some places that are so
majestic, so ecologically sensitive, so important to the
(29:09):
environment. You you shouldn't build there.
But what's what's wrong is to use those kinds of arguments
where they don't make any sense.So again, some of the best
examples I'm familiar with are around me.
I've seen these kinds of environmental arguments used to
block housing behind the loads. Like like there's just like some
(29:29):
woods behind the Lowe's in SouthBurlington.
Why can't we build some housing?I did not realize what you meant
by Lowe's for a second. Then I'm like, oh, like Lowe's
like the. OK, yeah, like the store, like
the the home improvement store, there's a Lowe's, there's some
woods behind it. Some developers wanted to like
build some apartments in the woods behind the Lowe's.
(29:51):
And you would have thought that like Mount Rushmore was getting
spray painted the way that they acted like this would be
vandalism on the landscape. And it's like I just, I get very
frustrated with what are obviously disingenuous arguments
being thrown out because actually taking care of the
environment is important. Actually climate action is
(30:11):
important. And so it's just very, very
frustrating to watch nakedly badfaith arguments, you know, use
that. It's especially with the green
energy transition, you know, I, I think a lot about solar and
nuclear adopting all these climate friendly attack and then
energy production things. And it's like, like the solar
panels, I guess is a good example, right?
The solar panels in New York City that they're fighting in
(30:32):
like we're trying to transition our economy to a greener, more
climate friendly economy, but you're fighting solar panels on
the city, you know, or any sort of green energy, quite frankly.
And it's like it I, I, I like touse the example of the
permitting bill from Mansion Embarrass.
I want to say this was 2024 in the spring.
Yeah, I, I was Capitol Hill intern at the time.
(30:54):
And I remember getting rumors about the spill and reading
about it online. And it was again, I, I could, I
could be getting these numbers wrong, but I want to say it was
like a 2% increase or maybe 5% of, you know, carbon emissions
in exchange for like a 14% reduction of from what old solar
like and Electro all the other sorts of a green energy.
But of course the was it Sunrisemovement was there and just stop
(31:16):
oil. And of course the bill goes
nowhere. And it's, it's frustrating to
see the people not understand just this, this game theory
like, wait, there's option A andoption B And if you do nothing,
it's option A, right? It's it's very, very
frustrating. It's, it's the, it's just
basically the belief of just notunderstanding trade-offs when it
comes to advocates like that. Like I like to say, policy
(31:37):
politics and advocacy are not the same thing.
They would 100% intersect with one another.
But if you want to do advocacy and do advocacy, well, you're
going to have to understand yourpolicy and you're going to have
to understand the politics of your policy.
So climate activists always enter the issue or like the
problem with not understanding that they have to sow the seed
and understand why they should be getting people to understand
(32:01):
why their pet policy issue is the right one to do.
But instead they show up angry and they bully politicians until
a bill is set and then you were just left with nothing.
And with an issue like climate change itself, like doing
nothing is worse because the issue will continue to worsen.
Like prior to this job, I was working in carbon dioxide
(32:22):
removal technologies and community input there was
extremely difficult even workingin California.
And it's like, would you rather to just stop innovation to help,
you know, maintain and like lessen the worsening climate
issue, or would you rather just yell about it and then just
nothing happens and it just continues to get worse?
I. Think that can be applied to
(32:43):
pretty much any of the, well, ormaybe not any, but a decent
amount of the advocacy groups. I you spend enough time on
Capitol Hill, you kind of get the gist of, OK, there are some
people who are very serious and when they come in, they set real
polite and they have their binder and they explain to the
member exactly what their plan is and why it's important and
why they should support it. And then you have the people who
come in with the phones and the signs and you're like, OK, this
(33:04):
is going to be a fun afternoon. But all that to say, I, I love a
lot of Portuguese are saying pivot back to the housing 1
though actually this morning, mylast morning about six hours
ago, but I saw the mass timber renaissance piece from from you,
Gary, about the new home technology construction or not
to go out. Always say this again, new, new
ish housing construction technology, the mass timber, the
(33:27):
prefabricated timber production.Can you talk a little bit more
about that? I mean, obviously you have a
report on today too. Yeah.
So we, we did have a new report out today too at the rebuild.
It's the the mass timber Renaissance and you can also
find it at the Chamber of Progress website.
So Max Timber is a new building technology, which basically is
an engineered wood product such that you cross laminate timber
(33:50):
so that collectively those pieces are not much, much
stronger than individual lumber pieces.
OK. And there's a new technology.
The first mass timber building in the United States wasn't
until 2011 in Montana, really didn't take off into the last
four or five years. And it's it's got all kinds of
benefits. For one, it's a way of
(34:10):
increasing housing supply because it's great at the 6th
floor to 18th floor medium height area, because it's
stronger than conventional lumber.
It's got strength to weight ratios higher than steel and
concrete. And so it's great at that.
And it saves a lot of cost too, because you basically do a lot
(34:31):
of the fabrication off site and then you bring it to the
construction site. You basically put it together
like a Lego set. And so there's an example we use
in the report of a an apartment building that went up in less
than three months. They took on average nine days a
floor that is lightning comparedto a lot of other construction
(34:52):
because you're not having a way for concrete to cure.
There's all kinds of ways in which the building gets done
faster. And so that saves up cost, saves
on time, cost to capital. People love the look of mass
timber buildings. The exposed wood is something
people just love the aesthetics of.
So it's not like there's even like this trade off of like, oh,
it goes up fast, but it's like ugly.
No, no, it goes up fast and you like the way it looks and the
(35:16):
sequester's carbon. So it's a new technology, right?
Like what? We're a Chamber of progress.
We're people who love tech. I get excited about new
technologies. It's like where like progress
comes from. And so we had this report come
out on mass timber and what policy reforms can do to
accelerate the rollout. There's neaper reforms around
(35:37):
forest management. There's permitting reforms
around oversized loads. There's stuff we can do to beef
up the manufacturing. But people can go can go read
the report if they want. But there's policy reforms that
can help this new technology come out even faster and get the
benefits even sooner. So we're, yeah, we're really
excited about it. I say I love that.
It's like my favorite thing, of course, whenever you guys make a
(35:59):
new report is that the Chamber of Progress seems to understand
that like that tech and innovation is the driver of
productivity, right? That this tech, we can innovate
our way out of problems, right? We don't have to just accept
that there's this finite rule and that's it.
It's like, let's, let's get creative.
You know what, here's a problem,let's find a new way to fix it.
And I really think that's what'sbecoming this new dividing line
between, you know, people who are pragmatic about the
progressivism, right? I see a problem, I see that
(36:21):
housings are too expensive and let's find a way to make a
solution, even if it's not perfect.
Let's try six different solutions, right?
Versus let's just, you know, do rent control.
It's like that's not that's justnot helpful.
Yeah, but I want to say I want to pivot back into the rebuild
and we'll go ahead and start to wrap it up.
But with the rebuild, right, you've both listed out all these
different policy plans and different objectives and
(36:43):
different things about making Democrats deliver.
What do you see in the future asthe not path forward, but the
substantive policy agenda that we're going to run on?
Right. Obviously, it's still early and
it is still 2025 S like a lot ofthis is just hypothetical, but
if you were in charge, what is this new agenda we're running
on? You know, abundance is still
(37:05):
being formulated. So what is the specifics, right?
Do you see a specific plan or isit just we're making costs come
down and that's it? Like what?
I think when it comes to runningon a specific policy plan,
you're not going to win in the realm of politics because you
have to have a message that people can actually believe in.
(37:25):
Like if you go back to the previous campaign, Trump didn't
have a specific policy plan outside of Project 2025, and you
asked him for plans. He said he had concepts of a
plan. What he sold was nostalgia.
And he did that well. And it's something conservatives
love to do for like, we can go back to the tariffs he kept
talking about. We want to go back to the period
(37:46):
before the Great Depression and so forth.
They just love selling nostalgiaand it really plays out with
their base. We are obviously always going to
push policy agendas that Democrats should focus on.
Gary had one that just came out a couple months ago as a road
map for Dems and they navigate next one to two years.
But in terms of the future campaign, I would suggest for
Democrats to stay focused on a future forward message.
(38:09):
We are only 5% into a Trump presidency and the negative
impacts will be compounding and long withstanding for some time
where he has just kind of, in myoptimistic view, hinted us the
2026 midterm elections. And I think Democrats will do
well by offering not just a pathforward, but an alternative.
(38:29):
We can't just be the blame partyanymore.
A lot of people on the very far left do well with their base
because there's always somethingto critique, especially on
digital platforms like algorithms run on
counterculture. They love that.
But if you were going to talk tothe average person who just is
not online, no one wants to be yelled at all the time.
(38:50):
No, like people are tired of a resistance party and we lost a
lot of political willpower there.
So they do want to have politicians who have easy to
understand policy agendas. Like Kamala said 80 times over,
she had every single economist on her side and that still was
not enough for people. JD Vance and the other side was
(39:11):
saying, when it comes to housing, immigrants are stealing
your house. And that's why you should vote
for us because we'll protect it from you.
You have to say no, we want to build more housing so that
everyone is able to have a more stable and abundant future.
Everyone will be able to get paid a wage that they deserve.
And you have to counter that with an example and with like,
(39:31):
and I would say a lens. And I again, people gave so much
Flack for Derek and Ezra for coming out with the lens instead
of a policy agenda. But I understand it was kind of
like an abundance one O 1 book. You can't just give people all
of these policies and say here, this will help save America.
We're going to be like says who says the experts trust and
institutions have gone down. You can't just build trust by
(39:54):
that. Again, we need a new playbook.
I mean, Speaking of a new playbook, I would just say that
Democrats are naturally the party of ambition and change and
hopeful optimism, right? Like the most successful
Democrat in generations literally ran on a message of
(40:15):
hope and change. Like we can actually be
successful doing that. People.
A lot of people would like to believe that America's best days
are ahead of it and that their own finances best days are ahead
of it. And that we can bring costs down
and that we can have great jobs.And then we can have this like,
really awesome bright future. And that requires reform, right?
(40:37):
Like you're not going to get a future that's brighter than
today without reforming the status quo.
And so there is a reform to it. And and so that is what I would
would argue Democrats should lean into.
You know, and reform is different from radicalism.
This is one of the other things that I would say is like,
(40:58):
whereas like Trump wants to takeyou back 50 years and the far
left wants to like, burn it all down.
Like, actually, the right lane is use reform or we're going to
make things better, but we're not trying to do the French
Revolution. Like, we're not extremists, but
we do want to make change. It's a thing of we want to make
your life better, not worse. We're not going back 100 years,
(41:20):
right? Just just, I, I want you to have
a home that's big and cheap and not $1,000,000, right?
I want you to have energy bills that don't make you want to cry.
I, I want you to go to the grocery store and not like feel
like you're going to have a panic attack.
Really kind of strange world we're living in.
We're like, that seems to be like the outlandish thing to
say. That's the.
Uncool position. I'm like, what are you talking
(41:41):
about? That's like the coolest thing
there is. It's like making people's lives
better. It's the uncool position online.
I mean, like like I said, like it it it is just a feeds fire to
save these outlandish statementsonline because like that's how
you build an account and how youbuild a base.
And I think it was split ticket who had a piece that came out on
(42:02):
how people who do as politicianswho do very well online
typically don't do well like in the actual campaign and tend to
lose. And you have to, it made me like
take a step back and like, you have to understand, like if
specific sort of people on the Internet are rallying for one
specific idea, think to yourself, if I just went to my
neighbor and brought this idea to them, what would their
(42:22):
response be? If I went to some random person
down the street, I wouldn't evensay down the street.
I live in LA, middle America. And ask them about that same
policy. They might have a completely
different outlook than I do. It's like the, I would say like
the ultimate, like sampling error.
Yeah, ultimate sampling error. Like you're taking everything
you see online just because our little monkey brain isn't able
to distinguish like the little screen of what people say versus
(42:45):
what human being says. You know, really is quite
interesting because I think especially being a young person,
obviously I spent a lot of time around college students who we
spend a lot of time online as, as, as college students do.
A lot of people tend to follow into this.
It's like a group thing. But again, think they said that
radicalism of just, oh, this is this or it's this.
And there's no, you know, there's no reasonable discussion
(43:06):
of like, what is the plan or like, what are we actually
fighting for? It's usually just all or
nothing. And you're like, OK, well, this
is. They completely agree.
It reminds me of that meme that went around from like Gen.
Z1 and Gen. Z2.
I'm definitely Gen. Z.
And because I grew up with like Tumblr, like I remember like the
second Obama announcement, like I went on Tumblr that X morning
(43:26):
to find out results. And it's like growing up one
being online. And then I went to a very, very
leftist college and I was studying political science and
public policy. And all I knew were like these
internships. But at the same time, I also
work customer service shop sinceI was like 14 and I have a
family. I'm a first generation, an
American. I have a family who has no
connection to politics, no interest in politics at all.
(43:47):
And they were just trying to make a living for themselves.
So sometimes I find myself as a way to like check myself.
If I think I am getting a littlebit too into the weeds or
something, I'll like just like drop an idea of my family group
chat to see what they think because like, they are more than
happy to disagree with me. But it's also good that I check
myself. And I just don't find myself
like, yes, yes, yes, all of the time because we're just going to
(44:08):
continue getting into the weeds and we end up with the result
that no one outside of us might agree with.
I got to say I love that. I, I feel the same way.
It's like I, I, I was not very political, but I have an uncle
who does not use the Internet in2025 and still has a flip phone.
So when I, when I think about stuff, I'm like, let me, let me
see what my uncle Steve thinks about this.
And I would say if you're listening, but he doesn't have
(44:28):
Internet, so he won't be listening.
I ask him and he goes, well, it seems like a pretty good idea.
Or, you know, no, there's just such a simple like nature to it.
But just for context, I want to mention to the audience that the
the Gen. Z difference tends to be Gen.
Z1 is like the pre COVID, like graduating high school, like
going into young adulthood pre COVID and Gen.
Z2 is the post COVID, you know, TikTok, Snapchat, the Internet
(44:50):
generation which there is a hugedivergent.
Yeah, I think Gen. Z1 is even older.
So like I graduated in 2020 for college.
So that's when like you fully finished school.
Like we were entering adulthood as like COVID fully started and
it's just like, oh wow, OK, American Dream lasted.
Oh yeah, well, it is quite shocking just because like it's
weird that this is Nexus point of just COVID right, but for a
(45:12):
generation right of you know, 1020 years from 2000 onward,
right, Obviously you being on the further side of Gen.
Z1, but I'm I got the cusp of Gen.
Z1 right, like my little brotherwho's two years younger is Gen.
Z2 like he doesn't text normallyhe's on to talk all the time and
Snapchat. I'm like I what the hell
happened? How did?
Oh my God, speaking to my niecesis like the scariest thing ever.
(45:33):
Scary. The lingo you don't understand.
It I'm just laughing at you too,because I'm not part of any part
of Gen. Z.
And yet as a college professor, I've seen all of these like come
through as my students, right? So I've definitely seen like, I,
you see the cultural changes from like the people I first had
when I first started teaching inlike 2018 through COVID and then
(45:54):
COVID and then post that. And so it's just, it's, it's
funny how you do see a shifts like between the students.
And so it's just it's yes, thereis definitely a Gen.
Z12 thing for sure. 100% a lot of it comes down to I mean, I
hate it to be like this Mr. Gen.Z or but like it's it's the
screens, you know, it's it's theInternet, it's the tick tock,
it's the it's terrifying. I will say it's like that like
(46:16):
that. I like to think that social
media and these kind of things are going to be the at least our
generations lead paint, the kindof thing where it's like it just
kind of cooked our brains, but. Well, so I, I think, you know,
some of it's just cultural. I think so, like, at this point,
it would be not just like against the rules, but like
culturally weird and rude to light up a cigarette in a
restaurant. You just wouldn't do it.
(46:39):
Like everybody would look aroundat you.
Like, what kind of jerk are you smoking a cigarette next to me
eating dinner? And I think there's going to
need to be some like cultural norms push back on like when it
is or is it OK to like use your phone?
Like I'm, you know, old comparedto you guys.
And so like, we did not, you know, we did not have
(47:01):
smartphones when I was in college, but more basic phones.
And one of the things that I will see people do sometimes is
like have their phone out like at a restaurant when they should
be talking to people. And I'm like, yeah, that's,
that's the cultural stuff where we, you know, government's not
going to do that for us. We just got to have a like a re
orientation of our culture away from like phone study people.
(47:24):
Yeah. Sounds like it sounds like we're
calling for a rebuild and a reorientation and a
restructuring all in one go. Sounds like we use a redo.
Yeah, a reform, a redo. As my dad like used to say, we
need a Mulligan, we need to do over.
But this has been the Chamber ofprogress.
Tara Jari and Gary Winslet, thank you so much for joining me
today. Thank.
You for having us. Today I'm progressive.
(47:46):
We got the chat with the Chamberof Progresses, Tara Jarrari and
Gary Winslet. Tara is the Director of Economic
Analysis and a rising star in the world public policy.
Tara was previously with the Nick Scannon Center working on
social policy to upload God Damnit.
Today on Progressive. We got the chat with the Chamber
of Progresses, Tara Derari and Gary Winslet.
Tara is the Director of EconomicAnalysis and a rising star in
(48:07):
the world of public policy. Tara was previously with the
Nice Cannon Center working on social policy to uplift lower
and middle class families. Gary is an assistant professor
in the political Science department and the International
Politics and Economics program at Middlebury College where he
has taught since 2018. His first book, Competitiveness,
Death, Trade, Politics in the Cars, Beef, and Drugs, analyzes
the politics surrounding regulatory trade barriers in the
(48:29):
auto, meat, and pharmaceutical sectors.
The two of them are currently launching an incredible new
blog, The Rebuild, focusing on how Democrats can build more
lower costs. And one again.
Check it out.
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