This week, in heartfelt acknowledgment of our common project, I messengered over to Mayor Parker, City Council President Johnson, and all members of our legislative body — which, by the way, recently released a new, four-color, 45-page report titled “2024: An Incredible Year in Council” — the New York Times bestseller Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

I did so because this budget season would fit right into Klein and Thompson’s spot-on critique for how liberalism has lost its way, as some recent election results might indicate. Theirs is not a right wing critique, mind you; they are at the forefront of an intellectual third way in our politics, alternatively called “abundance progressivism” or “supply-side progressivism” or (my favorite) “outcomes progressivism.”

       Listen to the audio edition here:

And they’re not alone: The philosophy is further delineated in Why Nothing Works — Who Killed Progress and How to Bring it Back by Marc Dunkelman as well as on the Substack of Misha David Chellam. In its centering of policy reform and, especially, implementation, it’s also tied to Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka, who was a guest on our How To Really Run a City podcast with former mayors Nutter and Kasim Reed of Atlanta.

Remember Mayor Kenney’s signature program? Rebuild, funded by a regressive tax, created a new bureaucracy and was supposed to refurbish some 200 playgrounds. Uh, turns out that after seven years that number was actually 17.

In short, Klein and Thompson propose “a liberalism that builds” instead of one dominated by bureaucratic preoccupations on the writing of “new rules and the moving about of money.” They show the degree to which progressives reflexively defend regulatory roadblocks to progress — while championing progress in the form of funding initiatives that rarely come to fruition in a timely way.

In San Francisco, they tell us, it takes 523 days to get housing construction approval and another 600 days for building permits. I remember celebrating when then-Governor Jerry Brown passed high-speed rail in California — finally, someone somewhere was doing something big. Guess what? Thanks largely to environmental review that was created to stop things from happening instead of figuring out a way to get to a win/win, it never happened. Remember those 500,000 EV charging stations the Biden administration funded? We got a few dozen. The $40 billion for nationwide broadband? Yet to actually reach any homes.

Here, we can summon similar red flag stories. Mayor Parker’s ’26 budget proposal, after all, totals $6.8 billion. The final budgets of Mayor Street and Mayor Nutter? $3.8 and $3.9 billion, respectively. Are we getting into structural deficit territory? And just what have we gotten for all that spending of your money? Remember Mayor Kenney’s signature program? Rebuild, funded by a regressive tax, created a new bureaucracy and was supposed to refurbish some 200 playgrounds. Uh, turns out that after seven years that number was actually 17. (But odds are here that the proceeds from the soda tax that funded it will not be returned to you, the taxpayer).

Low-hanging fruit in Philly

Now comes the Tax Reform Commission created by Council President Kenyatta Johnson, which produced an abundance-informed set of interim recommendations, as I’ve chronicled, including wage tax cuts and ultimately eliminating the double-taxation BIRT tax while creating a fund that makes growth-oriented investments in workforce development. Progressives ridiculously called the plan Reagan-like “trickle down economics” when it actually owes more to smart Clinton-era progressive investment. In response, the Working Families Party resurrected an old straw man proposal: the imposition of a wealth tax.

Progressive Councilmembers Kendra Brooks and Nicholas O’Rourke have respectfully gone back and forth with me on this before. We’re already the most taxed city this side of Bridgeport, Connecticut, one where, according to the Economy League, only 5 percent of residents earn $200,000 per year and nine of our top 10 employers are nonprofits. there is no wealth left to redistribute.

Besides, the IRS doesn’t track unrealized gains from stocks and bonds, so do they have a plan for how to implement such a new, complicated tax — if it’s even determined to be constitutional? You can just hear Klein, Thompson and, especially, Pahlka: Are you going to rely on city Finance Director Rob Dubow to become a Columbo-like sleuth and try to figure out just who owes what?

“We would have to figure out the structure for that,” Brooks told me, which kind of puts the cart blocks ahead of the horse. “But I didn’t make this completely up from nowhere. We had a wealth tax in place until 1996 and then dismantled it.”

Colorado’s Jared Polis is the elected official who has leaned in to abundance the most, having reached common ground in his second term with Republicans on a historic mix of free college, tax cuts, property tax reform, and denser development.

Well, actually, Pennsylvania had a Personal Property Tax of holdings such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, but the state Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1997.. Then-Mayor Ed Rendell tried to come up with a local wealth tax in its place, but it proved too difficult to implement and was found to drive jobs from the city limits.

Instead of platitudes with little or no thought given to diagnosis and treatment, it should fill these policymakers with terror that our city’s largest employers are overwhelmingly nonprofits. When you talk to business owners, they bemoan the fact that they can’t find qualified workers here. The tax reform commission’s proposed Jumpstart fund was a smart supply-side response — we need to “build” more workforce if we want to attract more employers.

Yet, as Council and the administration negotiate, I hear that provision may have already effectively fallen by the wayside. Given the state’s taxation uniformity clause, the city felt it had no choice but to wave the white flag before a lawsuit challenging the $100,000 small business exemption to the BIRT tax. As a result, the $30 million that the commission slated for investment may go to relief for those who no longer can access the benefit.

On one level, that makes sense. That relief is much needed for small business owners as long as the BIRT still exists. But Philly’s curse has long been incrementalism. At some point, leaders have to put some reputational risk on the line to make long-term economic investments, as Klein and Thompson posit. To her credit, as Nick Hand’s budget breakdown for The Citizen has shown, Mayor Parker has more than doubled spending on economic stimulus in her ’26 proposal. But just spending more on what you’ve already been doing is not necessarily rethinking the philosophical underpinnings of government in an abundance-informed way.

The same might be said for Parker’s big initiative — her Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or H.O.M.E. plan, with its $2 billion price tag that includes the floating of $800 million in bonds. As Jon Geeting has dissected for The Citizen, the actual outcome — the number of new homes produced — comes up far short of her campaign promises to build 30,000 new affordable homes. And even the new goal of rehabbing and building 30,000 houses is in jeopardy if Parker and Council don’t do the necessary reforms around how land is disbursed and housing approved through the Land Bank — which is still held hostage by councilmanic prerogative.

Klein, Thompson and especially Pahlka would all agree: If you don’t do the hard political and implementation-oriented reform, we’re likely to get more record spending … and end up with basically more of the same.

There are new ways to do this — elsewhere

To be clear: After eight years of Mayor Kenney’s inaction, it’s a great sign that a tax reform commission is recommending investing in workers, and that a mayor is addressing housing. But talk is not enough, especially when there are models elsewhere that suggest a new way.

Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, is a prime illustration of the efficacy of abundance. It’s a diverse city, the Commonwealth’s fifth largest, a one-hour drive from Boston. And it has revitalized itself multiple times by doing what Democrats did for half a century, starting with FDR: In Lowell, they’re building their way to prosperity. The strategy applies to housing, yes, but also jobs and education.

Here’s Governing Magazine:

The city and public university are collaborating on the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC), which aims to develop a 1 million-square-foot area into commercial offices, labs, workforce housing, retail and entertainment venues. It is expected to attract companies in sectors like biotech, robotics, climate tech and cybersecurity, and it already includes Draper Labs’ microelectronics division as an anchor tenant. The project is also expected to entice companies that work in adjacent fields — such as those supplying parts used by the LINC companies — to enter other parts of the city.

The corridor’s location right next to the downtown district could boost patronage at local businesses, too … Lowell is also taking aim at vacant properties. A city ordinance cracks down on owners of large buildings who deliberately keep them empty and devaluing for years to get tax write-offs. Lowell requires owners to pay an annual vacant property registration fee — but if they want to avoid that cost, they can sell or the city will help find tenants, restoration grants or other resources for getting the property active again.

That’s the profile of a forward-looking city on the move. One willing to challenge age-old shibboleths that stand in the way of the actual delivery of progress.

Think of how an abundance or, as I prefer, an outcomes agenda can transform Philadelphia. Education? Maybe if progressives didn’t stand in the way of new schools and options for parents, Democrats wouldn’t have lost the political advantage they long enjoyed on the issue. This from the Fordham Institute:

In 2022, Vertex Academy opened a new charter high school in a Bronx district where 7 percent of students graduate ready for college. Families recognize that the schools in this district cannot provide a high-quality education, and over the past 10 years, the student population has decreased by 34 percent. Vertex was founded by Ian Rowe, who has a strong track record of building excellent schools in the Bronx as the founder and former CEO of Public Prep … Vertex’s solution was to offer three International Baccalaureate programs, which improve students’ chances of being accepted into colleges with course credits and scholarships. Despite this, the United Federation of Teachers attempted to keep Bronx students in the same low-performing schools and sued to prevent Vertex from opening. Thankfully, Ian and his team won the lawsuit, and they are now educating approximately 300 students.

In healthcare? Imagine a system that breaks through what healthcare economists call the “iron triangle” of access, cost and quality, as outlined by the Niskanen Center, in a comprehensive report highlighting just how the demand for care remains unmet due to regulatory barriers to increasing capacity and supply of health care centers.

The point is, it doesn’t seem like we’re having the right conversation. We should be acknowledging what went wrong in our big urban centers from a policy standpoint, and inspecting the ideas that will stop big city population loss. After all, California and New York are losing folks in droves to low tax, high supply locales like Florida, which will have electoral consequences come census time. And, now that Trump is warring with blue cities, we should be talking about how we solve our own problems at home.

Why do we own our airport, which J.D. Power ranked at the bottom in its customer satisfaction survey last year, when divesting it could bring a $3.8 billion windfall? Why are we in the gas business, when, if abundance Mayor Nutter had had his way, leasing it would have brought in $1.8 billion? What does the City own, and how much of it can be leveraged so we’re not afraid of the long arm of Trump? Shouldn’t that be part of our planning?

What does the city own, and how much of it can be leveraged so we’re not afraid of the long arm of Trump? Shouldn’t that be part of our planning?

So far, there have only been a smattering of abundance-driven politicians, leaders who double-down on increasing the supply of essential goods and services like housing, healthcare and education — in order to make them more abundant and, thus, affordable. Colorado’s Jared Polis is the elected official who has leaned in to abundance the most, having reached common ground in his second term with Republicans on a historic mix of free college, tax cuts, property tax reform, and denser development.

Our own Governor may have some abundance bona fides, as well. He supported expanding school choice in his first budget until his party wouldn’t defy the teacher’s union. And he created a position for Ben Kirschner from the private sector: Chief Transformation Officer, head of the newly created Office of Transformation and Opportunity. Kirschner has been effective at making government more efficient and, thus, competitive.

State agencies now document all permits, licenses and certifications within 90 days. Teacher certification process times now take one week, not 15. Business filings? Three days, not two months.The more red tape you can cut, the more you can build.

Klein says it’s unclear what politician will emerge as the progenitor of the abundance movement, but there’s no question that something’s brewing, and local Dems would be misguided to stay stuck in the past. Yes, the way we talk about these ideas has to evolve — no one who showers after work will be enchanted by nerdy talk of “abundance,” which is why I prefer “outcomes.”

But at least Klein, Thompson, Pahlka and the others are thinking and solving and saying, especially to big city mayors and blue or purple state governors: All that stuff you’ve been doing? The regulation, the high taxes, the sotto voce NIMBYism while you plant your Housing Is a Human Right yard sign, the tax the rich sloganeering … now that Trump’s back and you’re so very clearly losing, how’s all that actually working out for ya?

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