Ezra Klein Needs to Look More Closely at His Housing ChartEzra Klein had a classic column in the New York Times today where he advertises in his title, “America’s Housing Crisis, in One Chart.” The chart he highlights — new housing units per capita — is informative, but not quite in the way he says. The chart shows the cyclical ups and downs in the housing market and then a massive plunge in construction following the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-2008. Construction falls to one-third the long period average by 2010. It gradually creeped up so that it was 75 percent of the long period average by the pandemic. It rose somewhat further after the start of the pandemic, fueled by low interest rates and increased demand. Klein looks at his chart and sees massive underbuilding of housing which he attributes primarily to excessive government restrictions on building, such as zoning and outdated safety requirements. I look at his chart and see the lasting devastation to the housing market that resulted from letting a bubble grow unchecked in the first decade of this century.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/26/ezra-klein-needs-to-look-more-closely-at-his-housing-chart/Medicare for All Disappeared. Its Popularity Didn’t.In early 2020, all roads in American politics led to Medicare for All. The policy demand, shorthand for a universal, tax-funded, single-payer health insurance plan, began its ascent four years prior when it was elevated by Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign. Over the intervening years, its popularity soared, and debate became intense. By the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, everyone had an opinion, and where you stood seemed to say everything about your core values and fundamental worldview. For the rising economic populist left, Medicare for All was the flagship demand — the purest expression of the Sanders movement’s ethos, promising to mobilize ordinary working-class people en masse, across lines of political and demographic difference, in a necessary challenge to capitalist domination and exploitation. The Medicare for All army came equipped with political arguments, economic projections, policy papers, physicians’ opinions, patient testimonies, and regiments of self-taught true believers ready to talk through the details with anyone who would listen. As the pressure mounted, centrists squirmed in their seats, conservatives clutched their pearls, and corporations benefiting from the private health insurance status quo commenced a lobbyist hiring spree, affirming with their dollars how seriously they took the threat. Then, in mid-2020, poof. The demand for Medicare for All evaporated. Sanders’s primary loss and Joe Biden’s presidential victory squashed the momentum. By 2021, with the policy’s main champion defeated and an avowed opponent in the White House, the proposal migrated almost overnight from the center of the primary debate to the margins of respectable Democratic Party discourse. Even a public option, which Biden had promised to champion as a compromise, disappeared from discussion without a trace. When the Republicans, under newly reelected Donald Trump, set out inevitably to destroy Biden’s health care legacy, they were reduced to ripping up enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies — a distant fourth cousin to the ambitious and once-mighty Medicare for All.
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/medicare-for-all-popularity-polling[Excerpt] Where is Britain Going? by Leon Trotsky CHAPTER IV The Fabian “Theory’ of Socialism“The class war”, says MacDonald, “is created by capitalism.” That, of course, is false. Class war existed before capitalism. But it is true that the modern class war – between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – was created by capitalism. It is also true that “it will always be its fruit”, that is to say, that it will exist as long as capitalism exists. But in a war there are obviously two warring parties. One of them is composed of our enemies who, according to MacDonald, “stand for the privileged class and desire to preserve it.” It might seem that, since we stand for the destruction of a privileged class that does not wish to leave the scene, it is precisely in this that the basic content of the class struggle lies. But no, MacDonald “wants to evoke” a consciousness of social solidarity. With whom? The solidarity of the working class is the expression of its internal unity in the struggle against the bourgeoisie. The social solidarity that MacDonald preaches is the solidarity of the exploited with the exploiters, that is, the maintenance of exploitation. MacDonald boasts moreover that his ideas differ from the ideas of our grandfathers: by which he means Karl Marx. In fact MacDonald differs from this “grandfather” in the sense that he more closely resembles our great-grandfathers. The ideological hash that MacDonald puts forward as a “new school” marks – on an entirely new historical base – a return to the petty bourgeois, sentimental socialism that Marx subjected to a devastating criticism as early as 1847, and even before. MacDonald counterposes to the class struggle the idea of the solidarity of all those charitable citizens who are trying to re-build society by democratic reforms. In this conception, the struggle of the class is replaced by the “constructive” activity of a political party which is built, not on a class base, but on the basis of social solidarity. The excellent ideas of our great-grandfathers – Robert Owen, Weitling and others – when completely emasculated and adapted for parliamentary use, sound particularly absurd in modern Britain with its numerically powerful Labour Party resting on the trade unions. There is no other country in the world where the class nature of socialism has been so objectively, plainly, incontestably and empirically revealed by history as in Britain, for there the Labour Party has grown out of the parliamentary representation of the trade unions, i.e. purely class. organizations of wage labour. When the Conservatives, and for that matter the Liberals, tried to prevent the trade unions raising political levies then, in so doing, they were not unsuccessfully counterposing MacDonald’s idealist conception of the party to that empirically class character that the party has actually acquired in Britain. To be sure there are, in the top layers of the Labour Party, a certain number of Fabian intellectuals and liberals who have joined out of despair, but in the first place it is to be firmly hoped that workers will sooner or later sweep this dross out, and in the second place the four-and-a-half million votes which are cast for the Labour Party are already today (with minor exceptions) the votes of British workers. As yet by no means all workers vote for their party. But it is almost solely workers who do vote for the Labour Party.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/wibg/ch04.htm