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Ruben Gallego isn’t sure if he’s running for president yet, but he still has big plans for his Democratic Party once it’s back in power.
The Arizona senator is launching a huge, wide-reaching policy agenda on Wednesday that’s aimed at confronting a labor market — and workforce — getting reshaped in real time by the AI boom. He wants to raise the minimum wage and boost overtime pay while imposing taxes on data centers and automated jobs, in addition to creating a federal public works program to ensure US workers can cope with AI.
It’s a big move by the first-term senator as his party wages a pitched fight for control of Congress in next month’s midterm elections. He said he recognizes that the public needs to start hearing about what Democrats intend to do with control in Washington, if they wrest some of it from GOP hands this fall.
“People that are working right now don’t feel like their hard work is actually bringing them anything in return … and going into election season, people want to know where Democrats stand,” Gallego told Semafor in an interview this week.
“With AI becoming more and more prevalent in people’s lives and fears, I think it’s also important that we have a real forward-leaning policy that deals with AI and the workforce,” he added.
Gallego’s sweeping proposals certainly look like the policy engine undergirding a 2028 presidential campaign. He said he’s “not naive” about his work furthering that speculation, though he demurred on his future aspirations.
“No matter what,” Gallego said, “I’m going to be involved in” policy debates after the 2028 race.
“I’m not in the space right now to make a decision,” he added. “A lot of conversations have to happen between me and my wife, especially when it comes to raising kids and potentially running for office.”
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Gallego’s plan, which he pitches with a personal touch by invoking his upbringing in Arizona and the state’s recent run of rapid growth and economic change, touches almost every aspect of the American economy.
But he’s chiefly concerned with evident public views that wages are not keeping pace with rising prices — that the American “dream is slipping away from millions of Arizonans,” as he writes in his proposal.
On top of raising the minimum wage to $20 per hour and pegging it to inflation, his agenda would promote sectoral bargaining agreements to establish labor standards for entire industries, require companies to provide paid leave, and raise overtime pay for eligible workers from time-and-a-half to double pay.
He’s got equally ambitious plans for the AI industry, calling for a 10 percent excise tax on data center revenues and an end to tax incentives for those projects, a “robot tax” to discourage job losses due to automation, and consideration of a tax on AI tokens.
He wants to use that money to help fund a “New Deal-style” public works program to ensure the US won’t experience “massive unemployment” from the adaptation of AI.
“Data centers and AI companies cannot just be operating untouched and also unbothered in terms of what they do to our labor markets, to our communities. They need to be part of the solution and not just be a problem,” Gallego said in the telephone interview.
He also wants to prioritize reclassifying certain so-called gig workers as employees rather than independent contractors and require companies to give workers more notice ahead of mass layoffs.
Gallego said he’s ready to maximize Democratic authority to get it done. He proposed putting as much of his proposal as he can in a party-line budget reconciliation bill that Democrats can pass with a simple majority if they control the House, Senate, and White House come 2029.
He added that Democrats should not listen to the Senate parliamentarian if, for example, a minimum wage hike gets ruled ineligible for reconciliation (as it was in 2021).
“We shouldn’t be afraid to push the limits on reconciliation, on overruling the parliamentarian,” he said, arguing that Republicans have “already kind of blown up the parliamentarian primacy” anyway.
Burgess’s view
The rising class of Democrats has big ideas, and you can already start to see the party nearing a big debate about its agenda ahead of 2028. Gallego’s plan is one of the most expansive yet, but he isn’t the first to jump in.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Cory Booker of New Jersey have tax cut ideas. Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey wants his party to give kids universal health insurance coverage.
This bold flurry is a stark contrast with Democratic leaders, who would like to start really shaping their agenda … after the midterm elections.
Notable
- Former President Barack Obama is urging all Democrats to home in on AI as they shape their agendas, per The New York Times.