Candidates shouldn’t release lots of “plans”

Not for A.I. and the labor market or health care or anything else

Priorities matter more than plans. (Photo by Icy Macload)

Over the course of this year, I’ve been adjacent to a few different conversations about what kinds of plans (if any) candidates running in 2026 and 2028 should put forward to deal with the impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market.

I keep kind of hitting a dead end in these discussions because I don’t really share the background belief that candidates should be releasing detailed plans about lots of different topics.

The idea that A.I. could have a significant impact on the labor market over the next few years seems plausible to me. I would think less of a candidate who was totally dismissive of that possibility, and I don’t think anyone should be blithely reassuring voters that technological progress is good so therefore there’s no question to even ask here. I’d like to see candidates pointing out that A.I. risks make the basics — taxing progressively, ending Trump’s war on the tax police, reversing Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, improving unemployment insurance — more important than ever.

More broadly, I’d like to hear them say that it’s important to elect a president and a Congress that are determined to channel this technology for human benefit, not for the private wealth of investors — to do whatever it takes in terms of changes to tax and spend and monetary policy to keep people gainfully employed if this technology really starts to take off.

I don’t mind if people call that an “A.I. plan.” But it wouldn’t be a “plan” in the sense of the plans that Democrats have been releasing for the last 20 years. It would not, in other words, lay out in any detail exactly which tax and spend changes should be made to ensure that everyone who wants to work remains gainfully employed. Nor would it say exactly what that guarantee would mean. It’s more like a vibe than a detailed policy analysis.

But that’s not really a point of view that I have about A.I.; it’s a point of view about the whole exercise of plan-releasing.

Plans really came into vogue in the lead-up to the 2008 primary. They were associated with a group of then-young bloggers that I was a part of, and I was almost certainly personally involved in promoting plans-mania.

Yet right from the gate, plans-mania did not really achieve its implicit instrumental purpose. And this insistence on plans swiftly became a counterproductive exercise, leading in 2016 and 2020 to intra-party arguments that were both acrimonious and somewhat pointless. In 2028, I’d love to vote for someone who seems smart and well-informed, who’s recruited a couple of good veterans and a few interesting outsiders as policy advisors, but who doesn’t really have any “plans” at all.

The origins of plans-mania

The aughts saw a new cohort of political writers — including me — rise to national prominence from blogs and small-circulation ideological magazines.