Should Republicans continue to write off urban voters?

Jill Homan asserts in the New York Post that the GOP's

political future is bleak if it continues to write off urban areas as political losers.

...Indeed, current drama over Uber and the “sharing economy” perfectly illustrates the GOP’s opportunity.

Uber’s innovative business model has proved a challenge for Democrats, who are boxed in by powerful constituents like the taxi industry, as well as labor unions who have long had a bone to pick with businesses who use independent contractors.

Republicans like Jeb Bush have enthusiastically embraced the new “sharing economy,” while Hillary Clinton has been forced to offer caveat-filled statements of tepid support and even criticize the business model.

The stakes are high: Republicans control just four of the mayoral seats in the nation’s 25 largest cities and fewer than 20 percent of the city council seats.

These cities represent 35 million people, or roughly 11 percent of the population, and they’re a key component in Democrats’ strategy to flip red states to blue, and to swing “purple” states permanently to the left.

In urban centers like Raleigh, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Virginia Beach, an expanding Democratic base is making it more difficult for Republicans to offset their losses in the city with larger victories elsewhere in the state.

...And conservatives have more to offer cities than they might think. As longtime urban outsiders, Republicans have the advantage of being the reform candidates, standing up against one-party hegemony and a lack of accountability.

School-choice programs, for instance, have improved the fortunes of low-income students in New York City, Milwaukee and Washington, DC. Every parent, no matter their political ideology, wants the best education for their children.

Longtime residents of cities in working-class neighborhoods want safe streets, affordable housing and a city government that balances the concerns of Wall Street and Main Street.

Democrats offer simplistic, but ultimately harmful, mandates like “living wage” requirements.

As an alternative, Republicans should champion tax incentives that encourage businesses to relocate to struggling communities.

Georgia’s “opportunity zone” credit, for example, has allowed cities like Atlanta to provide a tax credit of $3,500 per job created for businesses that invest in blighted areas.

A “road map” for city success could include the elimination or reduction of occupational-licensing requirements that stifle entrepreneurship by forcing small, minority-owned businesses to meet costly training requirements just to open their doors.

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A bridge to the 21st century?

Rich Lowry writes at Real Clear Politics about why liberals hate Uber and other businesses of the sharing economy:

As a disrupter of sclerotic practices in the economy and government, the sharing economy is predictably the subject of a furious regulatory and legal counter-assault. Uber has been a target in cities around the country, and abroad.

...Presumably the CEOs of sharing-economy companies in the U.S. don’t have to worry about being hunted down and jailed (at least not until Bernie Sanders is president). But when Hillary pledged to “crack down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors,” it was clear what she was talking about. She is signaling her intention to declare open season on innovators not to the liking of the regulatory-business complex.

One would think that new services that link up workers and customers in creative ways would be welcomed, not feared. But Democrats are increasingly the party of economic nostalgia. They still want that bridge to the 21st century; they just want to travel the other way.

Read more here.

Internet-enabled intimacy

Are you getting your needs for human connections met? Are you craving real human interaction? Jason Tanz writes about the new "sharing economy."

The sharing economy has come on so quickly and powerfully that regulators and economists are still grappling to understand its impact. But one consequence is already clear: Many of these companies have us engaging in behaviors that would have seemed unthinkably foolhardy as recently as five years ago. We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.

This is not just an economic breakthrough. It is a cultural one, enabled by a sophisticated series of mechanisms, algorithms, and finely calibrated systems of rewards and punishments. It’s a radical next step for the ­person-to-person marketplace pioneered by eBay: a set of digi­tal tools that enable and encourage us to trust our fellow human beings.

In the sharing economy, we aren’t anonymous. We may not meet our trading partners face-to-face, as in the RelayRides example. But because our transactions are often linked through our Facebook accounts—some version of our real identities—we are dealing, even virtually, with real people. It’s a digital re-­creation of the neighborly interactions that defined pre-­industrial society. Except that now our neighbor is anyone with a Facebook account.

Read more here.