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Ezra Klein: “There is something liberalism is good at and knows how to…”

Featuring: Ezra Klein, Liberal | New York Times Columnist and Podcast Host | National

In-Studio Discussion with Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom on 'Abundance' and Democratic Governance

Published March 26, 2025 | Video Starts at 04:08

We have to build faster than we have ever built and the laws don't really permit that. And so the thing that I began thinking a lot about was that There is something liberalism is good at and knows how to look for, which is where can we subsidize something that people need? But there's something liberalism is bad at because it doesn't know how to look for it, which is how do we create more? How do we make it possible to build more of things people need? (04:08–04:15)

CLAIM

Asserts that liberalism is effective at identifying areas for subsidies.

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Ezra Klein

“Of the 56 states and jurisdictions that were trying to apply for the money, three had made it through.”
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“It took the Affordable Care act four years to begin delivering actual insurance.”
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“We built the Empire State Building in a year.”
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“The average environmental review takes four and a half years.”
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“By the end of 2024, functionally, nobody is hooked up to [rural] broadband.”
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“Every major company [Elon Musk] has done is built on government subsidies, government loan guarantees, over 3 billion government demand.”
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“We could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis.”
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“California high speed rail has always lit me on fire.”
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“We have to build faster than we have ever built and the laws don't really permit that.”
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“There's something liberalism is bad at because it doesn't know how to look for it, which is how do we create more?”
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“Not only are we not good at pursuing that, we don't even realize how often we are getting in the way of it.”
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“The cost of living crisis is worse in blue states.”
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“All these fast track bills required me to take on a bunch of new standards and requirements.”
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“One of the big headline pieces of it is $42 billion for [rural] broadband 2021.”
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“The stimulus bill under Obama that had three big headline projects for reinvestment, it had high speed rail, it had smart grid, and it had a…”
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“0 for 3.”
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“Europe builds trains better than we do. They just do. And they have governments, I checked. And they have unions more than we do.”
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“We do government different in this country than they do in Europe. There's a qualitative difference between it, which is they run government…”
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“There are two major liberal movements that happen in the 20th century. The one we think about a lot is New Deal liberalism.”
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“In the 60s, 70s, 80s, you have real problems that have emerged from this New Deal order.”
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“We are cutting highways all across the country, many of them, though not all of them through marginalized communities.”
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“There is a genuine despoiling of the environment.”
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“It's Reagan who signs the California Environmental Quality Act.”
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“Initially cea, it just says, look, when the government does stuff, it's got to produce a report on, you know, what the likely consequences…”
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“The Supreme Court rules. No, no, no, no. Public development is anything that requires a permit by the state of California.”
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“CEQA's power is amplified a lot by courts that interpreted it in a way that was very different than anybody initially.”
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“This is part of a period in liberalism where you have this rise of an environmental movement that has legal dimensions and political…”
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“The key thing about this period of liberalism, the New Left period of liberalism, is that it is fundamentally skeptical of government…”
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“The New Deal is this alliance between the government, the unions, and the corporations to build, to put people to work, to industrialize…”
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“The New Left comes in and says, we are destroying this place. We are turning this country conformist.”
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“The way it tries to square it is create a million different ways that individuals or individuals represented by nonprofit groups typically…”
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“It took on the Inflation Reduction act, which is doing the much smaller job of just beginning to negotiate prices on some drugs, three years…”
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“You are not going to hold the people you need to hold. If your answer in every term is you can't feel what I did because the government…”
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“In making these cities so expensive, we did the real gating. We really closed the frontier, because the true frontier isn't land, it's…”
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“The Merced Bakersfield leg, which is the leg that is currently being tried... had line of sight on something like it was in the range of 11…”
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“The ridership in those quarters, as fast growing as they may be, is not enough to throw off money. It's not even enough to handle that…”
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“It wasn't exempted from CEQA in the first place. It's a pro environmental project.”
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“The federal program wasn't just for high speed rail. It was to start where you had air pollution for marginalized communities.”
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“People have no fucking idea what is happening in these regulatory processes.”
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