Governance After Neoliberalism (Neon Liberalism #78, with Rey Fuentes)

Samantha Hancox-Li and guest Rey Fuentes, Director at the Roosevelt Institute, discuss the Democratic "ideas primary." Roosevelt's new "Good Life Agenda," a package of governing tools and policy proposals, aims to get beyond the "submerged state" and return to an ideal of active government delivering for the people. Their talk ranges over industrial policy, taxing the rich, and why mass membership organizations are essential for good governance.

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:10]**
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I am Samantha Hancox-Li. The presidential primary is still a long way away. The future agenda of the Democratic primary is ultimately going to get settled in that contest and in that political arena, but the ideas primary has already started. And when I say ideas primary, I mean this competition among Democratic thinkers, liberal thinkers, think tanks, party institutes, political shops of various kinds to try and pitch what their vision of a future Democratic policy might look like.

And as Trump's approval numbers have been going into the toilet, as he's leading us through increasingly ruinous policies, it looks like there might be a real chance for a future Democratic administration to put forward a pretty transformative vision of American life. And so, to try and get a sense of the ideas primary, the state of the ideas primary, and one of the competitors in that primary, I'm really excited to have on Rey Fuentes. Rey is a director at the Roosevelt Institute, and the Roosevelt Institute has just put out a pitch, a platform in this ideas primary, something they call the Good Life Agenda.

So, yeah, Rey, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. So let's start with an easy one. What's the Good Life Agenda?

**Rey Fuentes [00:01:41]**
Thanks, Samantha. Thanks for having me on. I love the easy ones first.

Well, I think, as you described, we are thinking at Roosevelt intently about how we can move forward in any governing agenda that comes forward. Again, this isn't an agenda designed for one particular moment. We're thinking about generational shifts in the ways we think about government, how government serves us, how government shows up in our daily lives. So the Good Life Agenda is an attempt by the Roosevelt Institute to lay a marker and a forward-looking vision, one that says, hey, government is designed to act for people, it's designed to act to build a better life. And in a democracy, part of this is about accountability, part of this is about trust, and so we layer that into the agenda.

But really, what we are trying to do is identify, beyond an affordability crisis, beyond abundance politics, beyond some of these pieces, what is the synthesis that really talks to what's happening right now in people's lives. And that's why we talk about affordability, but we know that affordability alone is not the answer. Government has a role to play in lowering costs and ensuring that everyday essentials are affordable, like healthcare, childcare, housing, but we also want to raise incomes, we want to build power in the workplace, and we want to help people reclaim time. Time is an incredibly valuable component of our agenda, where we're talking about the loss of time that people feel is real. We had an economist at one of our kickoff events where she was discussing what is actually valuable to families, and money is valuable, but time with their families is a huge component, and that's where we want to get at some of those pieces.

And so we think about this holistically: how can government show up? And that's why we list out a series of public tools that the government can start using after we've rebuilt capacity and designed government to work better for people. How can we then use the tools of government to show up in people's everyday lives? And I think that's what the Good Life Agenda is intended to do, which is to show that forward vision.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:04:00]**
Okay, so like I said, there's a lot of entrants in the ideas primary here. At Liberal Currents, we're working on one of our own, something we call the Reconstruction Papers. If you're interested in that, if you'd like to receive a physical copy, you can pre-order that — links down in the description, and it'll also be available for free online as a PDF. But if you would like a beautiful physical copy, you can go ahead and pre-order that now.

But again, we're hardly the only ones, you're hardly the only ones. What would you say is distinctive about the Good Life Agenda? What really separates it from some of the other entrants out there?

**Rey Fuentes [00:05:00]**
I think first it's really not necessarily a backward-looking document. We want a forward-facing agenda that provides a positive vision. Now, I'm not saying that anybody else here isn't also thinking about a positive vision for the future, but this one is designed specifically to engender, in everyday folks who are thinking about this agenda all the way up to the technocratic folks that are really thinking about how we can deliver, that frame — a frame that is capacious enough to see people fit underneath it. That's why I like to talk about the Good Life Agenda as part narrative intervention. It's part of providing the scaffolding that shows how other people fit into this agenda.

But the synthesis is the other point. I think we've gotten caught up in progressive circles, when we think about populism versus abundance, or thinking about the technocratic reforms we need versus delivery, and I think we need all of it together. We have said this very clearly before. Our idea here is that abundance without reflection on oligarchy is thinking about delivery without thinking about the power structures that will undermine that delivery or hijack that delivery for their own purposes. But populism, within this process, and thinking about how the politics play out, means that we should be thinking about people and their lived experiences in our economy. So that's why we are using a lot of the time with these economists who work at Roosevelt, who really think deeply about these issues, driving them towards: what is government delivering that should show up visibly in people's lives? So that's why we talk about in the report very specific pieces of the agenda that are about visible governing capacity. I think too often we've been caught up in the debate.

**Rey Fuentes [00:06:24]**
I know Suzanne Mettler is a favorite political scientist of mine, where she's discussed the submerged state, and you've discussed it before, where we've lost a sense that government delivers because it has been buried in the tax code, in regulatory structures. So a big component of this agenda is making government visible — using the tools of government to build childcare capacity, to help reinvigorate housing finance, but in public ways that show the government is involved in this process. We have an example of that in New York with Mayor Mamdani, where we have delivery of childcare, we have explicit attempts by the government to show up directly in people's lives, that starts to both provide the necessary resources for a good life, but also a sense of trust that government is there to deliver and can actually deliver in the future.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:07:25]**
These reports are too long.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:07:32]**
That's a good life. That's a good life.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:08:32]**
Yeah. Yeah.

**Rey Fuentes [00:09:02]**
Absolutely. We describe it in the Good Life Agenda as a toolkit, and this is not exhaustive. And you're right, this part of our agenda does speak to the next governing moment having to include a focus on these tools, reviving these tools of government, because you got to the problem diagnosis exactly the way that we would, which is we have not only a submerged state, but we have, I think, this seductive attraction to the market as a solution center for all of our problems. And that had been a governing thesis for the last 50 years, where we think about, can we solve this? Well, if we get a market involved, then it'll resolve itself on its own. We won't need any intervention. And so that, I think, is beginning to break down as people see the economy really shudder at shock after shock after shock, recognizing that public capacity is a component that we're missing in the story. So for those that are thinking about a next governing moment, it is this toolkit of governing tools that will, I think, provide a baseline for that next governing moment.

And I'd say upfront, this is really agnostic — these tools are agnostic to the user. We know right now the current administration is using some of these tools, like industrial policy, different tools that would be in this toolkit, but could be used for any other purpose. So that's why we have to pair it with a Good Life Agenda, where you have a frame for why we are using these tools to enhance people's lives.

But to take a very specific example, the tool I was just actually thinking about this for a conversation we're going to have around tax: tax kind of underlines the broader work of the Good Life Agenda, because it's about restructuring relationships of power within our economy, and that is principally what tax policy can help us do, which is recognizing that the wealthiest Americans, the wealthiest corporations, have not only concentrated their power but are building what Brian Galle, one of our fellows, has described as dynastic wealth that can live on in perpetuity, regardless of what any government wants to do. That's why it's important to discuss tax policy as one piece of the puzzle that really builds out this restructuring of power relationships, and then through the tax revenue that is produced — obviously that's the purpose of tax as well, which is to fund the government that we care about. It's then: what is it that we do with that money? And the other specific response is then make government visible with that money. Our first order should be ensuring that we deliver on universal childcare, ensuring that we deliver on healthcare access.

Thinking about the housing affordability crisis is one that can be solved through government capacity, and housing is a great example of the ways in which the tools work together. You can think about building countervailing power in the housing sector — could be tenants organizing together — and in public policy, supporting that organizing effort to ensure that we can lower rents and be more competitive in the market. You can think about housing showing up in industrial policy, where we use very specific tools of finance to ensure that we have the infrastructure and the tools and the capacity and the materials to be building long-term the way we need. So that's the way we think about these tools, in a snapshot, kind of showing up in the Good Life Agenda, and why it's so critical that we think about all of them holistically. And it's not that that's the menu, those aren't the only tools available. We talk very clearly about things like government enforcement as a tool, as a very specific tool that can bring about some of the policies that we argue for in the report.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:12:44]**
There's a lot in what you just said, a lot of stuff that I've got little bookmarks that I want to talk about. Tax policy is interesting. We've seen kind of this wave of Democratic, populist — slopulist, some people call it — proposals for tax cuts. We're going to cut taxes on teachers, or cut taxes on boats, or cut taxes on tips, or whatever it is. And I appreciate the pushback. We're actually going to have an article up here at Liberal Currents, probably tomorrow, next week, early, saying we can just tax the rich, and just kind of working through here's all the ways — like in the One Big Beautiful Bill, in some of the Bush-era tax cuts, where we have just tilted the tax code to favor the very richest, and, as you mentioned, to favor dynasties, the way these people are just hiding their money from the government and trying to pass it on to their kids forever without paying any taxes on it. And really, we can raise a lot of money by actually cutting back on a lot of these rich tax loopholes.

But I don't actually see that as distinctive for the Good Life Agenda. I think a lot of Democrats are going to be like, "yeah, let's raise taxes on the rich" — that's not going to be a heavy lift. I'm interested in the industrial policy side, where you talked about, yeah, the current administration is doing some of this, and you say, yeah, maybe we should do tariffs, maybe we should have government stakes in private industry, the so-called golden shares that Trump has attracted a lot of criticism for, I think, from the Democratic base for engaging in. So I'm curious about what you think of kind of embracing some of these policies that look like they came out of the Trump administration.

I think the point about corruption is something to linger on. I had Joey Politano of Apricitas on the podcast, and he basically said, yeah, the Trump tariffs have just been a corruption bonanza. They're on one day, they're off one day, you can talk to Trump, you can give him a big pile of cash, and he'll tweak your tariff — a big pile of gold, or a big pile of steel, or whatever stupid stuff it is. They've just been a corruption bonanza. And this isn't actually something unique to Trump. A lot of countries that have tried this kind of active intervention in the economy have had problems with corruption, because you're talking about the government directing very large sums of money, making and breaking businesses. So tell me, what kind of tariff policy do you think we have, or do you think we ought to have, and how do you ensure guardrails, like you say, against these kinds of abuses?

**Rey Fuentes [00:14:36]**
That's a good question. I'd take the first — I mean, related to tax policy, I think the differentiator for the Good Life Agenda is thinking about... Natasha Sarin had a really great op-ed in the New York Times, where she was talking about the loss here in the debate. I think you're correct, the way we describe it here as well, from the slopulist perspective, that everybody should get a tax cut and nobody has skin in the game. I think the Good Life Agenda is about rebuilding a vision for a government worth paying for. That was a line in her piece, where it was really thinking about how we build a government that other people would recognize, that we have a broad consensus in society that it's worth paying for. We want that because we know that it delivers, and that's the delivery component of this, where people recognize that delivery is connected to the tax we're paying. And so it structures all those pieces together.

And I'd say, to your point, we just had the Social Security trustees report that just dropped, showing the solvency date for the Social Security program, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that reconciliation package passed by the Trump administration — is actually making that problem worse. We have a situation where we're cutting taxes, and the future benefits of this program could lead to devastating cuts for millions of Americans. So that's a critical component of this conversation, that these are active policy choices that are going to really — the chickens are going to come home to roost in the near future, and we're sounding the alarm now.

But to your second point, around industrial policy, this is something we're thinking about at Roosevelt very intently, where we are trying to discuss the next governing moment where we have these tools available, and they didn't start with the Trump administration. You saw prior administrations making really direct investments in the American economy — the Chips Act, for instance, ensuring that we can build domestic capacity in chip technology. How can we think about that moving forward, which is really a question again about power and guardrails? We can think about things like golden shares, things like tariffs, that should be designed with guardrails to ensure that we don't have one administration or a cabal of individuals profiting from that moment, and ensuring that that actually serves the public good. I mean, I'm surrounded here by pictures of Roosevelt, and the New Deal is an example of that — was it perfect? No, but were the tools designed very specifically to serve public ends? We would argue they were. And that's a vision for future use of things like industrial policy.

Yeah, part of this — and Todd Tucker is our director of industrial policy, and you can see some of his writing on the subject — where we think about how we are using these tools proactively. But the guardrails come, I think, specifically from the transparency and the use of the tool itself. I think that's one of the pieces. Predictability is another.

**Rey Fuentes [00:18:29]**
When we think about tariff policy snapping on and snapping off, I think we are not having a public conversation around the avenues for which that power can be used. And reinvigorating this conversation around industrial policy means updating some of those tools. See, the Trump administration was relying on what would have been a relegated component of what they thought their trade policy powers were, and then exerted them aggressively, and in a way that we think could potentially have provided some benefit had it been thoughtfully designed to ensure that we're protecting specific manufacturing capacity — the tools in our economy that can help us grow a stronger, better future. Those are components that we need to start thinking about more intently.

And that's why Roosevelt has this broader perspective: that industrial policy fits, again, in this type of Good Life Agenda, where we are building the foundation, a foundation that can protect and preserve a lot of the things that we care about in our lives — things that are threatened because we are not thinking intently about how we are building systems. And so the systematic approach is the one that Roosevelt prefers across areas, including industrial policy.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:20:04]**
It's amazing.

**Rey Fuentes [00:21:07]**
Well, I would think about part of this issue — and you raise it here, that you're thinking about these companies, these industries becoming complacent and anti-competitive. This is part of an argument that we think this is the point, where it's about the market kind of designing itself and being the most efficient. This Adam Smith, invisible hand, every country designs its own policies to advantage its very specific skill set and then disregards the rest — I think something that has impoverished the debate generally, because part of the discussion has to be about active government intervention and how we shape markets, and those are intentional choices. And when we get out of markets, when we say the market will handle it, that's an intentional policy choice too. So that's the other thing we want to uncover for folks: we are making intentional choices either way, we just act like one of them is, "we're leaving it to this all-same market to decide."

And that's where I brought it back to the Chips Act, for example, where we're thinking about how are we building a connected infrastructure for next-wave technologies that aren't controlled by one country or a set of countries, but where there's capacity internally to manage, control, develop those types of tools that we know are going to be vital for the future for so many things in our economy. And that's where part of this conversation is: what is the right mixture of tools, both internal industrial policy, tariff policy, that is designed specifically to help structure the boundaries of a fair market? And then you can have international negotiation over some of those pieces. But we think one of the broad errors of the current administration is a blanket tariff policy, irrespective of its rational connection to both our economy and a global economy.

So we have to think about all of those pieces, and then tie them around this story related to corruption — that we have a situation now where self-dealing becomes, I think, an essential component of how the public thinks about these issues, and so they lose a lot of public legitimacy. And how we think about it actually playing out on the ground floor, with people using these tools — that's why the transparency and the guardrails are components for having people believe that this policy can deliver. And so that's why we think about it in the Good Life Agenda as a component and a tool that works within the Good Life Agenda framework around trust and delivery.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:23:52]**
Yeah, so I didn't mean to be saying that we should leave everything to the free market. I was not trying to say that. And I think you mentioned the Chips Act, and that's an instructive example, because the Chips Act seems to be working. There are fabs going up out there in the deserts out there in Arizona. The American chips industry is taking off. The EU, they have their own Chips Act, it sucked, it didn't really do anything, but the American Chips Act worked very effectively. And one of the things it did, it said, who's the world leader in chips? It's TSMC. We're going to invite TSMC into America. We want to bring this foreign company into the American market. We're going to give them a lot of money, we're going to have a lot of subsidies, but ultimately they're going to be selling these chips on our market. We're not going to put up a big tariff barrier on Taiwan and say, well, we're not going to buy any of the best chips in the world, we're not going to insulate American chip makers from this foreign competition.

And you can see the opposite thing happening in cars, for instance, where, like, who's the best car maker in the world right now? BYD could probably give anybody a run for their money. But what we're saying is, we've got to keep BYD out of here. We can't have BYD coming into the American market, that would be a problem. And to me, I'm like, maybe we should. If they can build better cars more cheaply, yeah, we should bring them into the American market. We should say, yeah, build some factories here, and that'll bring these kinds of foreign skills into the country, create some competition that'll drive the rest of the industry, instead of just saying, well, your name's Ford, so you're protected forever. That's kind of why I worry when people talk about industrial policy. There are versions of it that I think can be quite destructive of industrial capacity, and there are versions of it that can really work to create industrial capacity through the positive interaction of government and markets.

I'm glad you mentioned electrification, because that absolutely is in the Good Life Agenda, where the report talks about infrastructure and the importance — both in this and many other cases — that the government has a responsibility to create a market where there's going to be competition. If there's electrical vehicle charging infrastructure, but it's only owned by one company, then that's going to create basically lock-in. Well, you want an electric car, you have to buy it from these people, there's going to be no competitors. And so the government has the responsibility — do we want to have an electric car industry? We've got to make sure that there are common standards for electric charging stations, we want to have public support for electric charging stations all over the place. And that's absolutely in the agenda, and that's a great example of governments making markets, like you say. These are intentional choices that we can make.

**Rey Fuentes [00:25:30]**
Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, absolutely. But if we think about this future, I think taking the electrification argument as a component, like the structuring of an intentional policy that can build electrical charging infrastructure throughout the United States, as a baseline precursor to building electrification, ensuring that we have a system available that can support electric cars on the road — and that is not foolproof, and that's an essential barrier, but one that the government has a role in ensuring we build out that capacity. I don't know if Roosevelt has a perspective on electrification, I'd have to go back and check that specific point, but the idea that government has that role is part of the industrial policy conversation, because you're building that foundation.

But if you have a market that becomes overwhelmed by a foreign competitor and you lose your domestic capacity to build and to actually compete on a level playing field that would allow that sort of healthy competition, I think that's one thing that we should be worried about. And that's why intentional, strategic tariff policy in the future is something that shouldn't be off the table, and that's where the Good Life Agenda's discussion around this toolkit is.

**Rey Fuentes [00:26:55]**
Also, like I mentioned at the top, this is a situation where it's necessarily, in the future, going to be agnostic to the user. And so you're thinking about any of these tools that can be used now for corrupt purposes — they can be used now in ways that can seem to delegitimize their use in the public eye, but there are other ways that you can actually shift that conversation and show that this is government delivering. New Mexico is an example of delivery related to public options in childcare, where we're building out a public option that allows families to have secure childcare situations and come to work. And so this is part and parcel of the story of government showing up in people's lives in a positive and visible way.

Oh, absolutely. The government always makes the market.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:28:30]**
One might, yeah, in some ways. Okay, I don't want to spend the whole hour arguing about tariffs, so I want to ask about some of the other things. It has come up when you talk about guardrails, when you talk about, well, these are systemic or user-agnostic tools. And one of the things the Good Life Agenda says is, well, how are we going to ensure that the government governs well? We're going to build countervailing power. So this is one of the key hallmark, capstone — whatever — one of the important tools in the toolkit. Tell me about countervailing power.

**Rey Fuentes [00:28:43]**
No, no, it's interesting.

**Rey Fuentes [00:29:17]**
We think about countervailing power as, again, a foundational component of some of these tools, and in some ways, maybe it's most important. We had Dorian Warren from Community Change join us at an event where we launched the Good Life Agenda, and he talked very intently, and I think very accurately, about countervailing power as the tool that's going to allow a lot of this governing agenda to be durable into the future. It's about building the capacity for government to deliver, and then ensuring, when we've built that capacity, that there is power on the other end that recognizes and has an investment, ensuring that there's sustainability long-term.

I brought up Social Security — that's the paradigmatic example, I think, of a government, a public program designed to serve a public end that is incredibly visible to its beneficiaries and has an organizing capacity. You have AARP, for example, that will be there to defend the program long-term and its sustainability. And so countervailing power is about building those connections.

We recognize union power as one of the keystones of some of that work. That's why we argue for broader access to unionization. That's why we think sectoral bargaining is a path that should definitely be considered for any future organizing effort, that allows us to move away from this shop-by-shop organizing and to an industrial perspective, like in an entire industry. And then we think about countervailing power showing up in lots of other spaces — consumer power, tenant power, ways where we can push back against concentrated corporate power. That is going to be addressed in any form through tax policy, through public options, but also through collective power of people coming together and saying we have shared common interests, and there is organized power on the other end that may be obscured. Concentrated corporate power is another type of countervailing power against reforms that could make things affordable for families, bring time back into a family's life. For example, when companies are profiting off of time-wasting loops in customer service, pits where nobody can get an answer — that's a profit to somebody, but it impoverishes the time of families that spend their time thinking about those things rather than spending time with their families, going to a public park, engaging democracy.

I think, at the end of the day, that's why countervailing power is going to be such a critical component to any future good life, because it's the thing that can make it sustainable for the long term.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:32:13]**
Oh, yeah, so this is interesting to me, because you covered a lot of stuff under the heading of countervailing power. We were talking about unions, we're talking about associations like the AARP, like tenants unions.

I was struck by a passage in the Good Life Agenda that I'm going to read, because I think it's interesting, to start reversing that imbalance — this imbalance of power between the public and corporations. "We need our government to be more plugged in and responsive to people's concerns and aspirations." Garrett Monheit and Joseph proposed that agency public engagement should be designed as a continuous process informing which issues policymakers prioritize, which solutions they pursue, and how agencies are held accountable for mistakes. They recommend reforms that support policymakers regularly receiving unscripted public input — for instance, through listening tours or open-ended complaints — as well as reforms to allow policymakers to more effectively use surveys and focus groups to ensure that public comment is truly representative.

And to me — I think to a lot of people who are tapped into these kinds of debates — they'll look at this and they'll be like, "wait, what?" Look, we look back on the last 50 or so years of American policymaking, and this is what we've been doing. We look at the government, and we say, man, the government's doing some bad stuff, it bulldozed that neighborhood, it built that highway, did this or that thing that we didn't like, we need to put more constraints on government, and we're going to do it in the form of public feedback processes. More community meetings. We're going to do a study to see how many community meetings we have to determine — like, the community meeting will be about survey design that we're going to administer. And I've been to these community meetings, I've been to some of these things, and you're like — you talk about making the government visible, but you've got to make it visible, like, doing stuff. And these things have been like fetters on the government's ability to do anything, really. That's one argument that you'll see in these kinds of policy spaces, so I'm curious what your response to that is.

Just — okay, so I could frame this as a tricky question, but I'll just talk about my own experiences right here, where I live. Pittsburgh has a system that's called the — I think it's like the Registered Community Organizations — where in my neighborhood there's something called Lawrenceville United that is supposed to be a community organization that represents the people of Lawrenceville to the city government, that connects with us, learns what we care about, how the government is impacting us, and then represents us to the city government. I think — sorry if anybody out there really cares about this — but I think Lawrenceville United is a joke. I think they are fake. I think they are a fake organization that doesn't have any connection with the people of Lawrenceville. Yeah, they hold some community meetings sometimes, it's at the farmer's market, and five people drop by or whatever. But they have no genuine connection with the mass of people who live in my neighborhood. They receive some government funding, so that the people who work there can collect a little salary or whatever.

But the thing to me about this is, it's crazy. Who should represent me to the government? My elected officials. My city councilwoman. That's kind of the whole thing. What's her connection to the people of Lawrenceville? It's like, well, we all got together and voted for her. We had an actual election in which there is a genuine mass of people that participates, and this is supposed to be the actual mechanism of feedback that goes from the people to the government — is democracy. And these other things just feel like substitutes for democracy, where it's like, well, our democracy isn't working, so we should just build a second democracy that is less democratic. And that's how some of this stuff reads to me. So I have some skepticism — not about countervailing power generally, but about some implementations of it that your report seems to suggest.

**Rey Fuentes [00:35:00]**
No, I really like that point, actually. That is a really interesting quote, because it really sets up some of the work Roosevelt did in the fall with Hannah and Johannes, where we think about the specific government capacity and the specific tools that are available that we need to be thinking about in a next governing moment. Any administration should really care about this, because it's what is the conduit that allows some of that public comment back into the government in a true and genuine way. I think you're right — this is not the Parks and Rec version of droning public meetings that are about agendas and any sort of rules of order. It's really about how can we get at a genuine perception of public will as it's refined through what can many times be an opaque regulatory process.

Before joining Roosevelt, I was at the Department of Labor, where thinking about intentional use of public comments and public input is sometimes mediated through very stilted terms, through commenting on a regulation. I think it's very difficult for the everyday person to believe that they can comment on a 250-page regulation and realize that their voice is being heard. That is a very difficult thing to do. That's why Hannah has highlighted, I think, very specific pieces. You can get incredibly concrete in this next moment. The Paperwork Reduction Act is a tool that really prevents the government from collecting information about people. It had, I think, in some sense an intentional design, which is to ensure that the government isn't burying people in paperwork.

**Rey Fuentes [00:36:00]**
That's very true, that could happen. But what it has done is hamstrung government agencies in their ability to actually go out and ask people questions. If you ask more than — I think it's ten people — you need a formal regulatory process to ensure that the collection of that information is in a way that would allow the government to not overwhelm individuals in that type of paperwork. But it then prevents the collection of things like survey responses, things that the government could use on an intentional basis to aggregate public opinion and to really understand it in a way that doesn't have to come from third parties or outside sources. The government could collect this information, and the government is of us — like this is that FDR quote, it's not an alien power over us, it is us.

And so thinking about that next governing moment means people in the next moment who are going to go into government need to be armed with the tools to recognize we need to get rid of those pillars. So we'd never go out into the world and discuss this with an everyday person and say the Paperwork Reduction Act will solve this problem, but eliminating that barrier, that very technocratic barrier, can then open up the conversation to say, if we eliminated that, we could actually ask you more questions about what kind of childcare situations you face, that isn't from some aggregated survey, but an actual intentional "how does the economy show up for you?" And then start building policy solutions that address that issue, and then you start building a public feedback loop that is: the government cares, it has a policy, and it's going to deliver that policy visibly. And when we make mistakes, we course-correct, but when there are victories, when the government is able to deliver a public policy efficiently, then people start to realize, oh, this is what government is about, and there's so many ways in which it shows up in people's lives that we don't realize. And that's the thing the Good Life Agenda is also attempting to switch.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:37:59]**
Yep, do it.

**Rey Fuentes [00:40:05]**
It has a really fascinating perspective. I think one of the issues that we reckon with at Roosevelt all the time, and via this report, is specifically related to how people are showing up. We have in our government a representative democracy where we occasionally elect people to run governments of various levels, but we think of democracy less as a moment than as an act. We are working to build a government and build an economy and build a society where democratic infrastructure is part of the process, where people are acting through every layer of government, but every layer of community organization. And there are barriers in the way. I think, to your point, I can't speak to the organization and who they're soliciting, and how people come out into those forums.

But one thing we highlight in our report, for instance: the average family of two with children has 600 more work hours in a year than they did since 1975. So we're talking about parents that have taken on the accumulated weight of about four months of paid work, with no changes to things like universal childcare, universal paid leave, paid sick leave, for God's sake. I think those are things where we've left the policy choice to private individuals and thought, well, they'll just figure it out when they can. But then where does that leave time for parents to come out to a community meeting, respond to a survey, think about talking to their neighbors about any individual issue? Because we think about this at the atomized level as well. This is the individuals lacking time to truly be a part of the next governing moment.

And it will require public policy. Predictable scheduling is something that we talk about a lot, and it's not a surprise, and it's not a new policy. Cities all over the country have passed fair scheduling laws. But if we had a fair scheduling law that allowed you to know, hey, I'm going to be off on Thursdays, I know that I will be off, I'm not going to be called in, so I can go to a kid's soccer game, I can go to a community meeting, maybe, and discuss potholes and things that matter in my community — those are things that actually build the larger democratic project and ensure that people are bought into a government, and then can actually start steering it. And so we see some of these things as preconditions to the good life: the barriers that stop people from being able to participate in daily government.

Yeah, I was literally thinking that — that's so funny. I think you really hit it square on from our perspective. I think you had Robert Trzeczynski on, who was discussing democracy and oligarchy have to be talked about together at the same time. If we miss that point — if we miss the point that our participation in democracy is being mediated through institutions, corporate institutions concentrated to basically steal time, to steal resources, in a way that makes it more difficult for us to show up in everyday life — that's a cause for public concern, and that's why we make that distinction, or that connection, very clear.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:42:45]**
And one of the examples you gave of countervailing power is the AARP, and they are a genuine mass membership organization. The government didn't create them, they created themselves. They have dues-paying members, they have people who are organized and interested and lobby for their own interests. Might not always like what they lobby for, but, yeah, gotta give it to them, it works. And you talk about that — that one of the things we should be thinking about here is how to rebuild these kinds of mass membership organizations, that we've seen just kind of a decline in civic life in America, both in terms of unions, but also just in terms of everything. This whole "bowling alone" thesis — one of our contributing editors here at Liberal Currents, Alan Elrod, is very interested in the bowling alone stuff, and I think he has a fair point, that there's been this decline in community engagement, like you say, in the time and the energy and the organizing abilities that people have.

And that's interesting to me, because in some ways we have more capacity to organize ourselves today than we ever did. Every single one of us has got a TV studio and a megaphone and a library right in our pocket, and we can reach the whole world. But at the same time, it seems to not be working very well. So I'm curious, what's your perspective on how do we recreate genuine mass membership organizations that can be politically active, that can serve as a force of countervailing power to oligarchy, frankly?

Okay, this might be drifting a little bit off topic, but I'm really interested in what you think about X, and the regulation of social media generally. Because on the one hand, yeah, there are a few big apps that are the big ones — YouTube, TikTok are far and away the biggest ones, then to a lesser extent Facebook, X, etc. And so there actually is some competition out there. If you don't like X, you can get on Bluesky. People set up alternative social media systems all the time. The old internet is still out there, you can still just type stuff into the URL and go somewhere. There are still blogs that are running. But people have migrated a lot to the walled gardens. And in the walled gardens, oligarchs like Elon Musk are putting their thumb on the scale, and they are pushing the agenda that they like, and they're suppressing the agenda that they don't like.

We may have just seen some pretty horrific instance of this in Northern Ireland, where Elon Musk has been pushing some very hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric, and we've seen what some people are calling a pogrom, where thugs are just going door to door and attacking people's houses and burning down houses and so forth. So this is some real stuff. How would you, using the tools of the Good Life Agenda, approach regulating this kind of question?

**Rey Fuentes [00:45:09]**
Because if you have a corporate concentration that can raise prices at a whim and lower incomes and suppress wages, for instance, you have a situation where people have less money, less time, less agency. And it's not just that story of concentrated corporate power where markets can come together and corner resources and start hoarding them for themselves, but then it's a public problem where we're not thinking very clearly about how to use the government's tools related to antimonopoly policy, for instance, and competitive policy — where we're thinking about how these institutions are actually extracting a lot of things that matter to people, to be able to do the things you just described: show up to a community meeting, start a podcast, discuss things that we really cared about when the internet, in a golden age, was a forum, a space that wasn't mediated through five apps now that control most of the market, and that can suppress your voice.

You think about the idea of X, or Twitter as it was called before, being the public square, and now you see clear statistics around individual voices being suppressed for their political views. And so that can't be a space or a conduit where we will have a broader conversation, unless we break up some of the concentrated power in the market that has prevented people from having genuine access to tools that allow them to speak to people in their community. And so that's why that also fits under a Good Life Agenda as the narrative — that we have a lot of different pillars and avenues that hold up, I think, a singular perspective, that lots of people have a different vision of what a good life means, but most of the time people are not able to achieve that vision for very predictable reasons, which we laid out in the report.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:47:58]**
Easy, that's it. Yeah, so I agree with a lot of that. I mean, you can just see a lot of these companies are up to the same old tricks that got Microsoft busted for anti-competitive practices back in the '90s, and now they're just back at it, and no one cares — or at least no one in power cares. And so, yeah, I think there are real reasons to be very skeptical of just how concentrated we've let certain tech sectors get. I'm not 100% sure that answers this question about algorithmic mediation, and the extent to which owners of these various walled gardens, whether they own other things or not, are putting their thumb on the scale for the political agenda they like. But maybe that's beside some of the point.

We're coming up on the end here, and I would be terribly remiss if I didn't ask you about housing.

**Rey Fuentes [00:48:28]**
We've discussed components of the report related, for instance, to antimonopoly policy, having reinvigorated tools — and this was, we think, true during the Biden administration. Lina Khan's leadership at the FTC is something that is an inspiration generally to how we think about confronting corporate power. Because if you have a single company that owns a messaging platform, and then how you can share that messaging platform, and then where that messaging platform can be used in an interoperable way with other organizations, then you say, oh, maybe we'll just own all of search. And then if you own all of the different pieces, even though you can claim that they're distinct competitive markets, but you seem to have a hand in controlling all of them, then we have to have a conversation about what it means to have a competitive market, when it's like five companies that can do all of these things together — in which we know there's evidence in the past of a lot of these corporate players colluding over hiring practices, for instance, over talent, where it's really distorting the marketplace, and then using the tools of corporate concentration to do things like insert non-compete clauses into every employment agreement, and to force everyone into compelled arbitration, so they can't actually use the public tools and our public courts to vindicate public rights.

So these are things that are consequences of corporate concentration, and things that I think any next administration can really think about concretely. Because if you can free those forces, build actual markets that ensure that you can't take excess profits, essentially as rents, because you're too large to regulate — if we can break that up, I think that's a component where, moving forward, you'd have even more competition in the marketplace, but it'd be better for the end consumer. And those are things that I think are really relevant and touch on the Good Life Agenda as we think about corporate concentration.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:51:03]**
Yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:51:15]**
I should have started with housing, because we probably could just talk about it for the whole hour. As you highlight, housing is basically most households' largest expense, and it's enormously important. Where you live determines where you can work, it determines where your children are going to go to school, it determines how safe you are in your everyday life, it determines how your retirement nest egg is going to perform over the next 10, 20, 40 years. Enormously important. As a society, we have concentrated so many different things onto the single pivot point of housing, and it seems to be a problem. Everyone can kind of recognize that this system is not working anymore. So how does the Good Life Agenda want to approach the housing crisis?

**Rey Fuentes [00:51:15]**
Amazing. I know, absolutely. Yeah.

We would start by discussing frameworks generally around power relationships in the economy. We have differing ways in which individuals can live in their homes — they can rent, they can buy. We have to think about power across the structure. It's not just about who owns homes, it's who can live in them safely, who can afford to live in them, even if they rent. Those are components of the Good Life Agenda too, where we think that that will relate to this housing question, where we're raising incomes and lowering costs. Those are components where the government can show up that don't necessarily implicate housing policy as a first-order concern, but definitely as the longer-tail issue that is going to be incredibly important to that story.

But when we think about housing specifically, the abundance critique of unnecessary veto gate points, unnecessary regulation — I think we can accept some of that criticism, we can say yes. I think there are moments where we have lost our way in terms of building where we need to build. Our fellow Ned Resnikoff has discussed this issue in great detail in a way that I think is persuasive to a lot of your audience, if they read some of his stuff — which is that we have lost that component. But we have to be intentional about the next moment, and those are where we can get into hard industrial policy. He's talked very specifically about this. We need the inputs, the materials to housing policy — lumber, labor, all the different components that are essentially under assault now by tariff policy, by immigration policy — are things that absolutely need to be addressed if we want to have a robust housing agenda moving forward. And building is a key component of that. Supply, obviously, is going to be a component. But if we only focus on those components, and not about concentration in select markets, countervailing power, where we have homeowners organized together, renters organized together to maintain wins long-term, and then to surface those wins when government needs to pivot in certain markets or in certain ways where policy is not actually living up, or even counterproductive — we can't lose sight of those pieces.

So that's why, when we think about housing, it fits around all of the toolkit pieces and many of the issues that we talk about in the report. But this one very specifically, because I think you have talked so eloquently about the fact that our housing crisis in the future — there's no silver bullet solution to housing affordability, but it means so many different things, which is why I think it's one of those issues that has such a multifaceted touchpoint to every part of the Good Life Agenda.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:54:59]**
Now, yeah. So I agree with a lot of that. In the paper, you talk about three different kinds of policy approaches, and again we're running short on time, so pick one. One of them you talk about is the use of development banks, where basically the government says, yeah, we're just going to have our own fund that offers preferential loans for the kinds of housing that we want to construct — you give an example of a program in Montgomery County that seems somewhat successful. So there's the credit side of this, the financial side of it. You talk about tying federal money to local zoning reform, which really gets to a lot of the abundance questions. And you talk about productivity in the construction sector, which is a real deep-cut sickos thing, where — well, because productivity in the construction sector has been pretty stagnant. It's been stagnant for decades, as compared to productivity in a lot of other sectors, where we've just gotten much better at making more stuff with fewer people-hours, not so much in construction. And so this addresses the cost-of-construction issue.

So what do you think? What do you want to talk about? What's the best avenue for discussing the Good Life Agenda here?

**Rey Fuentes [00:56:07]**
Yeah, well, two of them very quickly. I think we've discussed before where we've had a perspective — Roosevelt has talked about the Road to Housing Act, for instance. For whatever flaws we might want to have about debates around government policy, one thing it was doing right, and one thing that we need, are tools that can increase productivity on the supply side. So thinking about prefabrication, thinking about design-builds that can be delivered to government, so they can think about supply expansion in really routine ways that build that capacity faster, and then incentivizing that with government funding. And that's where it pairs together on the financing side, where you need avenues to ensure that that financing gets to the communities that are building the fastest, best possible options available to increase supply.

And that's where Ned Resnikoff has really been very clear about connecting to: what are the government funding streams that go to these communities that are non-negligible? I think a lot of communities will say community development block grants aren't enough, that's actually not going to persuade me. But if you're connecting larger government grants — these are discretionary federal grants that can be delivered to communities — if that's tied to specific housing goals, then I think that will change the conversation in localities in real ways. And I think that's an important consideration, and one where we're investing our public dollars, and they should go towards a public end to ensure that housing is being built. But it's not just a build-only, and that's where the Good Life Agenda is this component: build for what? Build for a life where people have time and agency, and if they are renting, that they still have power in their community, they still have a say in how their community is built.

So I think it's a broader conversation. I think where the abundance fight is happening, it's fitting right within this Good Life Agenda, and we hope the others see the rounder picture that we're trying to portray.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:57:30]**
I absolutely agree with that. I think there's just no way around talking about zoning reform and other kinds of artificial scarcity, but you're quite right to highlight that there are other ways that we can support the kinds of housing that we want to see, other kinds of government tools, like I said.

Unfortunately, we are out of time. So I want to remind everybody who's listening that if you admire this beautiful and elegant mug that I've been drinking out of this whole conversation, you can go over to the Liberal Currents merch store and buy a beautiful and elegant piece of Liberal Currents merchandise, whether that's a mug or a tote bag, or the Reconstruction Papers. If you want to pre-order that, links to both in the description.

And yeah, Rey, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure talking to you.

**Rey Fuentes [00:58:30]**
Samantha, thanks so much. It's been really fun.