James Talarico And The New American Dream

Minimum wage to AI dividends, here's what Talarico actually said.

Last night I attended James Talarico’s New American Dream kickoff tour in Arlington, where he unveiled his economic plans. I livestreamed the entire thing on TikTok. Here is the playback:

There were somewhere around 2,000 people in attendance. I’m not sure even this photo does justice to how packed the arena was:

But I wanted to talk about Talarico’s economic plans, because this is the part that matters way more than the crowd size. It’s about the policies that are actually going to make a difference in people’s lives.

Economic and tax policies.

Talarico started with raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay. Honestly, that’s the floor. Any and every Democrat should already be supporting those things if they put a (D) next to their name.

He wants to repeal “the big ugly bill,” the GOP tax package that handed the top 1% a windfall while the rest of us watched our grocery bills climb. Fine. Good. Take it back. But Talarico didn’t stop at repeal. He wants to take that trillion dollars and turn it into a cost of living tax cut for the middle class.

He also drew a line between small local businesses and multinational corporations, and said the tax code should treat them differently. Radical concept, I know.

Then he called for rebuilding labor unions. In Texas, where “right to work” has been gospel since before most of us were born. That’s a fight he’s choosing on purpose.

On debt, he split it into two problems and addressed both. Medical debt first. Cancel it, and rein in hospitals and insurers who let people go bankrupt for the crime of getting sick. Then credit cards. Cap the interest rates and go after the companies charging working people 25%, 30% to survive between paychecks.

And then the national debt itself. Talarico said close the billionaire tax loopholes, go after the tax cheats, and end the forever wars that have been bleeding this country dry for two decades. He explicitly rejected the idea that regular people should pay down a debt they didn’t run up.

None of this is radical.

Families, education, and housing.

Talarico leaned hard into the LBJ comparison. LBJ was a Texas schoolteacher before he was a senator. So is Talarico. LBJ used the Great Society to build Head Start and Title I, the biggest federal investment in American kids this country has ever seen. Talarico wants that same scale of ambition applied to public schools right now. It’s a big swing. It’s also the correct swing, because our public schools have been getting starved on purpose for the last few generations and everybody in this state knows it.

He called for universal child care and paid family leave, which should not still be a controversial position in the year 2026. He wants the Child Tax Credit expanded and made permanent.

On housing, he wants to cut the red tape blocking new construction. Texas loves to brag about how much we build, but we are still short on the kind of housing regular families can actually afford (starter homes cost around $500,000 these days, I hear). He also wants down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers.

And then Medicare and Social Security. He wants to protect Medicare from cuts and kill what he’s calling a tax on Medicare, and he wants the wealthiest Texans actually paying into Social Security as the rest of us do. Because right now they don’t, not past a certain income cap ($184,500).

Energy.

Long-time Lone Star Left readers know exactly how I feel about the oil and gas industry. And out of all of the policies Talarico laid out last night, this is the only one I felt like he and I differed on. And perhaps some of you, dear readers, will be more aligned with Talarico on this, and maybe some of you will be more aligned with me. (It probably depends on your career path.)

Talarico bragged about Texas being number one in oil and gas, which is true. He also bragged about Texas being number one in wind and solar, which is also true. Texas is the energy capital of America. Full stop.

He wants the Legislature to stop attacking the renewable sector. Republicans have spent years trying to punish wind and solar with fees, mandates, and grid rules that exist for no reason other than spite, even as renewables keep the lights on and keep electricity cheaper.

His actual policy ask is investment in renewable technology, done in partnership with the oil and gas industry, not in opposition to it. Not either-or. Both. He’s framing it as continuity, the same state that led the 20th century on energy leading the 21st, just with a wider toolbox.

For those of you who are more aligned with me, and want to stick solar panels on every rooftop, and replace every gas plant with a giant battery, it’s a compromise. And Talarico is making this compromise because fossil fuels still employ over 400,000 people in Texas. But one of these days, after another flood, another drought, or when the water runs out, we’ll have to stop compromising. Until then, we keep trying to push the Democrats left, because we know every single Republican has a fossil fuel executive’s **** in their mouth.

Technology and AI.

Talarico’s basic argument is that AI is shaping up to be the next arena where a handful of billionaires extract enormous wealth from the rest of us, the same playbook as the last fifty years, just running on new hardware.

Talarico is calling for an “AI dividend,” the idea that every American should get some kind of ownership stake or royalty check from AI companies, since those companies are training their models on collective human data and intellectual property that we all generated. It’s a provocative idea. In fact, I think Sam Altman or some other AI billionaire originally thought it up as a form of Universal Basic Income.

It’s also not fleshed out yet, nothing you could actually legislate tomorrow. But as a starting principle, “if they’re profiting off us, we get a cut,” is exactly the kind of thing that should be the floor of any Democratic AI policy. Especially if we’re looking at a future where the robots take all of our jobs.

He rounded it out with a call for entrepreneurship grants, public investment for people with good ideas who don’t have rich uncles or venture capital connections, pointing to Tesla and the internet as proof that public money seeding private innovation isn’t some radical new concept.

Is this a fully baked tech policy? No. But it’s a sketch pointed in the right direction, and I’d rather see a candidate name the problem honestly and admit the policy needs work than pretend he’s got it all figured out.

The argument underneath the argument.

Here’s the thing about all of those policies. Talarico built a spine underneath them, and it’s worth talking about separately, because it’s the part that’ll actually determine whether any of this sticks with voters who don’t normally read policy breakdowns.

His central diagnosis is that the affordability crisis is a corruption crisis wearing an affordability crisis’s clothes, and he backed it up with actual history. He went all the way back to 1971 and the Powell Memo, the corporate lawyer’s blueprint for how business interests could capture the media, stack the courts, and buy politicians in both parties.

From there he went after trickle-down economics directly. He called it theft. Fifty years of it. Tax breaks, bailouts, bribes, dressed up as economic theory when it was really just a redistribution scheme running in the wrong direction.

He also made a point of saying this isn’t capitalism; it’s crony capitalism, and invoked Adam Smith, joking that the man is rolling over in his grave. The argument underneath the joke is serious. Corporate markets in America reward wealth. He paraphrased Dr. King to make the same point: socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

And then the framing that ties the whole speech together. Talarico kept insisting this isn’t left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. (Which is really a leftist argument, 🤫.) Red, blue, independent, all of us getting worked over by the same people, for the same reasons.

Is it going to work? My Magic8Ball says it will, but this is only the first election cycle I’ve had this toy. But I will say this for Talarico. He showed up telling the truth about what’s broken and who broke it. That was enough to impress me on Tuesday night in Arlington.

• 89 days until the November election!

• Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.