# America needs a real AI economic plan — before the crisis hits > Source: > Published: 2026-07-09 10:00:00+00:00 When you ask people when they knew Covid was going to be a huge deal, they give a range of answers. “[When Tom Hanks got sick](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/tom-hanks-covid-19-diagnosis-likely-shaped-behaviors-thoughts-toward-virus)” is a popular one. So is “[when the NBA suspended the season](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/44136029/got-oral-history-nba-covid-19-shutdown-how-changed-sports-forever).” The most plugged-in people will sometimes cite [early rumblings from Wuhan in December 2019/January 2020](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-outbreak-virus.html). # America needs a real AI economic plan — before the crisis hits AI could create a rare chance to remake the safety net. Washington can’t waste time. [Dylan Matthews](/authors/dylan-matthews)was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy. ``` Key takeawaysAI is scaling faster than any past tech boom, and it’s likely to produce an economic emergency — a moment when policymakers will suddenly accept big risks and big changes. The US isn’t ready.These crisis windows open dramatically but close fast. In 2008 and 2020, near-universal cash payments and huge bailouts won bipartisan support, then vanished within months. Assuming AI will permanently shift politics toward generous policy is wishful thinking.Today’s proposals fall short on both ends: AI labs offer sweeping ideas — sovereign wealth funds, portable benefits — with none of the detail legislation needs, while DC figures like Gina Raimondo push undersized fixes like retraining, too small for a transition that could wipe out whole categories of work.Whoever has a detailed, ready-to-pass plan when the moment hits gets to shape it — the way TARP came straight from a “break the glass” plan drafted months earlier. ``` For me, the turning point came on March 17, 2020, when Republican Sen. [Tom Cotton proposed sending every American checks from the government](https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-releases-coronavirus-response-plan-to-give-cash-directly-to-american-families-and-businesses). To be clear, at this point, my then-employer Vox had already sent everyone to work from home indefinitely, and it was clear *something* dramatic was happening. But I hadn’t yet internalized that the [Overton Window](https://conceptually.org/concepts/overton-window) in American politics had shifted dramatically. True, there were some Republican Senators who, by 2020, were [expressing more openness to safety net programs](https://www.cbpp.org/blog/rubio-lee-child-credit-proposal-should-be-in-final-tax-bill), and [rethinking Reagan-style laissez-faire economics](https://www.nationalreview.com/news/josh-hawley-calls-on-gop-to-revitalize-great-american-middle-in-maiden-floor-speech/). Tom Cotton, though, was not one of these senators. I didn’t think he really had strong economic policy opinions at all; he was a defense and culture war guy. He cared about defeating China and, secondarily, defeating Woke. Universal cash handouts were not his bag. And yet here was Cotton, not just calling for near-universal cash payments, but also for welfare work requirements to be suspended and for big block grants to states to expand unemployment insurance. This turned out to be an early indication of the actual policy the US would pursue. Within a couple of weeks, with the US unemployment rate fast headed for what would be a [record high of 14.7 percent](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/unemployment-rate-rises-to-record-high-14-point-7-percent-in-april-2020.htm) in April, a Republican Senate and president had signed off on the CARES Act, which included payments of up to [$1,200 per eligible adult, $2,400 for eligible married couples, and $500 per qualifying child, along with a $600 per week unemployment insurance and a massive business bailout program](https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CARES%20Act%20Section-by-Section%20(Tax,%20Unemployment%20Insurance).pdf). The Senate vote was *unanimous*, and the House approved the final Senate amendment by voice vote. If you had told me literally any of that would happen in February 2020, I would have laughed at you. But the normal rules had stopped applying. All that was solid had melted into air. Much, much bigger things were, suddenly, possible. I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot as advanced AI models grow more and more capable, and more and more central to many businesses’ strategies. As of May, Anthropic is reporting an [annualized revenue rate of $47 billion](https://www.anthropic.com/news/series-h), [equaling](https://fortune.com/ranking/fortune500/) the likes of Coca-Cola and exceeding Netflix. That’s up from [$30 billion a month earlier](https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/). If their revenue keeps growing at 56.7 percent a month, they will outpace Amazon, currently the [highest-revenue company in the world at $717 billion a year](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-reports-717-billion-overtakes-143540004.html), by late November or early December. The [AI boom is already unfolding faster](https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-state-of-the-ai-economy) than the internet or mobile booms before it and may yet speed up even further. The debate over whether this tech is real and valuable is, essentially, over. The only question is what, and how large, its effects on our lives will be. This is happening unbelievably fast, and it seems likelier and likelier that we will face a moment, like that in March 2020, when the speed and disruption of AI progress begins to constitute an emergency that policymakers will be willing to take surprisingly large risks to confront. There will likely be a moment of unusual policy freedom and flexibility, a moment which is brief — but could enable large changes for the better. The US is currently not ready for that moment. But we need to get ready, fast. And we need your help. My colleagues at the [Center for Shared AI Prosperity](https://www.csaip.org/), a new DC-based research group, are attempting to collect a menu of detailed policy ideas that can meet this moment. In fact, we have an open [Request for Ideas](https://www.csaip.org/rfi) with funding that can go to the best proposals people submit for how to set up the tax code and safety net in a way fit for the AI era. Now is the time to act. ## These moments don’t last forever I sometimes talk to friends in the tech world who [assume that the power and economic impact of advanced AI will permanently shift our politics](https://moores.samaltman.com/#:~:text=The%20changes%20coming%20are%20unstoppable), and that the policies necessary to keep everyone afloat (like, say, a guaranteed income, or a sovereign wealth fund) will materialize without much effort. After some 17 years as a journalist covering US politics and policy, I think this is overly optimistic, so say the least. Congress is like jello: flick it and it will shake, but it eventually settles back to normal. Take Covid. Within a couple of months, the apparent consensus had evaporated, and Republicans were back to resisting safety net expansion. By May, Cotton had pivoted to pushing the [No Bailouts for Illegal Aliens Act](https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-introduces-the-no-bailouts-for-illegal-aliens-act), which “amends the CARES Act to prohibit sending future funds to states or municipalities until they certify they aren’t issuing stimulus checks or other payments to those in the United States illegally.” By August he had a bill to [deny virus-related federal employment funds to people convicted of federal offenses because of “riots.”](https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-bill-to-block-unemployment-funds-for-rioters) The pandemic was still raging but the policy emergency, and the bipartisan window for much larger-scale action, had mostly closed. The 2008 financial crisis offers another example. There, the window was open somewhat longer. At the very beginning of the recession, in February 2008, the Bush administration went against its normal laissez-faire commitments and supported a [stimulus package championed by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi](https://www.npr.org/2008/01/24/18375394/congress-white-house-agree-on-stimulus-plan) built around per-person checks to nearly all Americans, including many of those not owing income tax. In July, President George W. Bush signed a [bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac](https://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN3042756820080730/) in the face of strong opposition from fellow Republicans in the [House](https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2008519), but having mostly won over his party in the [Senate](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1102/vote_110_2_00185.htm). In September, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the possibility of a cascade of massive bank failures seemed very real, Bush demanded a sweeping [$700 billion bailout](https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-asset-relief-program) that proposed purchasing toxic assets from at-risk banks (the “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” or TARP). As the subsequent years would demonstrate, bailing out banks failing due to their own irresponsibility was not exactly a popular position in the general public. Members of Congress are not stupid, and they realized this at the time. On September 29, the [House voted down the proposal](https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll674.xml), with huge numbers of both parties defecting from Bush and Pelosi’s position. That led to a [large stock sell-off](https://web.archive.org/web/20081002032119/http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/29/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm) that terrified lawmakers. That experience, some last-minute tweaks, and truly herculean lobbying from the administration, the Fed, and others led the House to switch course and [pass the bill on October 3](https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml), though within weeks of its passage, Treasury abandoned asset purchases in favor of [buying equity stakes](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41427) in the banks directly. The full course of 2008 shows the value of, and power inherent in, being prepared. The February 2008 stimulus package was very roughly improvised. It [worked a little bit](https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDocumentID=5307), but proved nowhere near big enough. If Pelosi and Bush had had a more thought-through proposal on hand, perhaps one that [automatically repeated and scaled the checks](https://www.nber.org/papers/w34411) depending on where the unemployment rate went, then the recession would have been much less severe and the 2009 stimulus might not have proven necessary. TARP was an example of a case where some key actors *were* prepared. The structure of the program came from the “[Break the Glass Plan](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/04-Banks-I-Prelim-Disc-Draft-R3.9.11.pdf),” a proposal put together by Bush Treasury officials Neel Kashkari and Philip Swagel in April 2008 explicitly designed as a “just in case” plan for the extreme situation where the whole financial sector needed recapitalization. That case, of course, came to pass, and because Kashkari and Swagel had a plan, there was something for Congress to quickly pass. That was good — TARP played an important role in preventing the financial crisis from worsening. But it also meant that the plan reflected Kashkari, Swagel, and their boss Hank Paulson’s overall conservative worldview. One could imagine a plan like that which saw the US government instead outright nationalizing major banks, or imposing strict capital requirements on them in perpetuity as a condition of the bailout money, or banning them from owning hedge funds or doing speculative trading. A different administration with different views might have designed a different emergency plan — and because it was genuinely an emergency, that plan would likely have passed, with very different consequences over the next few years. ## What stocking the shelves for AI means One way to think of the project of AI economic policy in 2026 is as designing the equivalent of the Kashkari-Swagel plan: something detailed, opinionated, and actionable that can be deployed quickly when the situation gets dire. What that plan looks like will, of course, depend on one’s values and commitments; the America First Policy Institute’s emergency plan will not look like the AFL-CIO’s. The Center for Shared AI Prosperity was founded with an aim to produce plans of this nature designed to make sure any economic windfall from AI is widely shared, and that workers and low-income Americans are not left behind in the transition. We were also founded out of a frustration at the inadequacy of the proposals we were seeing from two ends of the AI policy debate. On the one side are ideas from the AI labs themselves. These tend to be ambitious — indeed ambitious enough to seem like plausible answers to a problem of the magnitude of AI completely reshaping the economy — but woefully unspecific. They more closely resemble dorm-room philosophizing rather than legislative drafting. OpenAI’s [“Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age”](https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/561e7512-253e-424b-9734-ef4098440601/Industrial%20Policy%20for%20the%20Intelligence%20Age.pdf) from this past April, is one such example, laying out a number of very broad ideas: taxing capital more, a sovereign wealth fund invested in the AI economy, portable job benefits. It’s light on the specifics: What kinds of capital taxes? How big a hike is too big? How do you make health benefits portable without disrupting people’s current plans? How does the sovereign wealth fund get its money? Anthropic’s [Economic Policy Framework](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/9ea607a5dd67c168093829b701f3a0a6d21156d5.pdf) is somewhat more specific, offering paragraphs per idea where OpenAI has a sentence or two, but still nowhere near the level of detail necessary to actually write legislation. On the other side are proposals from within the DC policymaking world, which are firmly rooted in what seems politically viable right now but would be woefully inadequate in the face of the likely economic disruption that’s coming. Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and her group [RAISE US](https://www.raiseus.ai/) have centered employee retraining; Raimondo’s recent [New York Times op-ed](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/opinion/ai-labor-unemployment.html?eafs_enabled=false) centered ideas like new credentials from community colleges and expanded apprenticeship programs as the answer to mass AI unemployment. These are sensible tools for ordinary labor-market churn, but they are mismatched to a transition that could displace whole categories of work on a compressed timeline. The dawn of machine intelligence will demand more from our leaders than certificate programs. The best case for this kind of caution is that ideas on the scale of the labs — sovereign wealth funds, universal capital accounts for all Americans, permanent relief funds for the long-term unemployed — are dead in the water in DC. Which might be true — now, at least. But this is where Tom Cotton’s brief love of cash transfers becomes relevant. We should not overindex on the way the politics look *right now*. The world is about to become very strange, and we may be surprised by the scale of change in response that can earn even bipartisan support. Indeed, it’s notable that both the 2008 relief measures and the 2020 CARES Act came under Republican presidents with Democrats controlling at least one chamber in Congress, which is also the likely situation after the midterms this year. Democrats are always willing to vote for big new safety net programs to protect unemployed and low-income people. But Republicans are often willing to compromise their usual anti-welfare stances when they’re the party in the White House, and their approval ratings depend on the country’s basic economic health. What action they might take in a 2027 or 2028 featuring massive AI-based economic disruption is still unclear. But right now, we all have an opportunity to help shape it. The [Center for Shared AI Prosperity is running a request for ideas](https://www.csaip.org/#rfi), seeking proposals for shared AI ownership, new AI-related taxes and revenue raisers, and new safety net programs to share the gains widely. We want ideas from economists and think tanks, of course — but also from the labs, from independent researchers and academics, and from ordinary citizens with an interest in where this technology is going. Stocking the shelves is hard work, and we don’t have all the answers. But you just might, and we’re going to need all the help we can get if the US is going to emerge from the AI transition as a prosperous, functional nation.