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Elissa Slotkin to Unveil Economic 'War Plan'
Elissa Slotkin to Unveil Economic ‘War Plan’
June 26, 2025 at 8:42 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 15 Comments
https://politicalwire.com/2025/06/26/elissa-slotkin-to-unveil-economic-war-plan/
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who won competitive races twice with Donald Trump on the ballot, is pitching an economic “war plan” for her party today, focused on delivering results and abandoning purity tests, the Washington Post reports.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/26/an-alternative-trumps-economic-plan/
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But a lot of those points mean going against party orthodoxy — killing sacred cows, as she puts it.
Supporting small businesses means Democrats need to stop demonizing rich people who were successful in their businesses. (“We want you to make as much money as possible,” she plans to say.) Stop focusing on “comprehensive” immigration reform and take what you can get for incremental improvements. Ease up on compounding regulations to get more housing built fast. Develop more energy, even if that means investing in planet-warming natural gas along with renewables. Fix the party’s bias toward elite four-year college degrees and see vocational education as worthy of investment.
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Her proposals have some echoes of the “Abundance” agenda, laid out in the book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has become required reading for many Democrats on the Hill. Slotkin said that “there’s a dearth of ideas, and so I have respect for anyone who puts ideas out,” but that she drew inspiration from her constituents: “on the ground, road testing, of campaigning and running and winning in a tough place.”
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But a lot of those points mean going against party orthodoxy — killing sacred cows, as she puts it.
Supporting small businesses means Democrats need to stop demonizing rich people who were successful in their businesses. (“We want you to make as much money as possible,” she plans to say.) Stop focusing on “comprehensive” immigration reform and take what you can get for incremental improvements. Ease up on compounding regulations to get more housing built fast. Develop more energy, even if that means investing in planet-warming natural gas along with renewables. Fix the party’s bias toward elite four-year college degrees and see vocational education as worthy of investment.
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Her proposals have some echoes of the “Abundance” agenda, laid out in the book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has become required reading for many Democrats on the Hill. Slotkin said that “there’s a dearth of ideas, and so I have respect for anyone who puts ideas out,” but that she drew inspiration from her constituents: “on the ground, road testing, of campaigning and running and winning in a tough place.”
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The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism's Rebrand
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-11-26-abundance-agenda-neoliberalisms-rebrand/
The past few years have seen a widespread move away from free-market dogma, as policymakers search for new economic perspectives. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 proved to be a crossroads for economic orthodoxy. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a Democratic administration did not entrust its economic policy exclusively to adherents of Robert Rubin’s philosophy, for whom the solution to any economic issue was usually “Be less of a Democrat.”
Instead, the Biden-Harris administration trusted progressives as a coalition partner, rather than an electoral faction that had to be dealt with, not worked with. The Biden administration attempted true industrial policy for the first time in over a generation, rekindled enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and didn’t shy away from stimulating the economy when it was foundering. And while Biden’s term has been a rousing success on most macroeconomic measures—the electoral loss turned in part on global inflation and the rollback of the temporary pandemic safety net—progressives’ increasing power within Democratic politics has caused some moderates to become enraged that they’re now expected to settle for the position of senior partner, and denied near-total control.
Enter the “abundance agenda,” an attempt to generate new messaging for a new political era in which neoliberalism has fallen rapidly out of favor. The term has been floating around for years, but has more recently become a rallying cry for a whole array of deregulatory causes. The abundance agenda has also offered shelter to effective altruists, who have been searching for a flag to rally around that isn’t associated with one of the largest frauds in world history. The Biden administration has started to usher in a post-neoliberalism, with more heterodox ideas competing for acceptance. Abundance is neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world.
What exactly abundance adherents believe varies, of course, but there are a number of broad precepts: building more housing, producing more energy, and fostering more technological innovation. None of these are objectionable goals; the differences with progressives arise, largely, in how to get there. Abundance starts from a “growth above all” mindset. The agenda’s advocates hate residential zoning laws—which, contrary to what they frequently imply, is something they have in common with us and most progressives—but also detest the National Environmental Policy Act, support fracking, oppose tenant protections, and are often deferential to the policy preferences of Big Tech.
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