The conclusion I reach from this is that Democrats should redouble our efforts to develop bold, creative ideas that offer broad-based benefits for the whole country.
Before I ran for President, I read a book called With Liberty and Dividends for Alclass="underline" How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, by Peter Barnes, which explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, much like how the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil royalties every year. Shared national resources include oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies, but that gets you only so far. If you view the nation’s financial system as a shared resource, then you can start raising real money from things like a financial transactions tax. Same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing. Once you capitalize the fund, you can provide every American with a modest basic income every year. Besides cash in people’s pockets, it would also be a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to one another—part of something bigger than ourselves.
I was fascinated by this idea, as was my husband, and we spent weeks working with our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my campaign. We would call it “Alaska for America.” Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the numbers work. To provide a meaningful dividend each year to every citizen, you’d have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs. We decided it was exciting but not realistic, and left it on the shelf. That was the responsible decision. I wonder now whether we should have thrown caution to the wind and embraced “Alaska for America” as a long-term goal and figured out the details later.
Interestingly, some Republican elder statesmen such as former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson recently proposed a nationwide carbon dividend program that would tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American. They think it’s a reasonable conservative response to the problems of climate change and income inequality, and a good alternative to government regulation. Under such a plan, working families with small carbon footprints could end up with a big boost in their incomes. We looked at this for the campaign as well, but couldn’t make the math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families, which I had pledged not to do. Still, it’s tantalizing. A conservative government in Sweden created a similar program in 1991, and within a decade, it had reduced greenhouse gas emissions and expanded the economy by 50 percent, because so many Swedes used their tax rebates to increase energy efficiency, thus creating new jobs, increasing productivity, and lowering their electric bills.
We need to be thinking outside the box because the challenges we face are only getting bigger and more complex. Climate change is one example. Another is the long-term effects of automation and artificial intelligence, both on employment and national security. Bear with me here, because I have a lot to say about this. Over the past few years, I’ve had a series of alarming conversations with leading technologists in Silicon Valley who warn that this could be the first great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates. The impact of trade on our manufacturing industry received a lot more attention during the campaign, but many economists say that advances in technology actually have displaced far more jobs than trade in recent decades.
For instance, between 1962 and 2005, about four hundred thousand steelworker jobs disappeared. Competition from steel made in China and other countries was part of the problem. But technological innovation and automation were the bigger culprits. They allowed manufacturers to produce the same amount of steel with fewer and fewer workers, at lower costs.
The same story has been replicated across many industries, and it isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The arrival of self-driving cars could displace millions of truckers and taxi drivers. Some economists estimate that automation could put a third of all American men aged twenty-five to fifty-four out of work by 2050. Even if we manage to create new industries and new categories of jobs to replace those we’ve lost, the speed and breadth of the changes we’re facing will be destabilizing for millions of people.
I’m not suggesting that we should try to stop the march of technology. That would cause more problems than it solves. But we do need to make sure it’s working more for us than against us. If we can figure that out, including how to talk about it in a way that Americans will understand and support, that will be both good policy and good politics.
There’s another angle to consider as well. Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.
Across the board, we should be unafraid to kick the tires on transformative ideas. Like taxing net worth instead of annual income, which would make our system fairer, reduce inequality, and provide the resources to make the major investments our country needs. Or a national service initiative much broader than anything we have now, perhaps even universal. We should totally reimagine our training and workforce development system so that employers and unions are true partners, and people who don’t go to college can find a good job and enjoy a middle-class life. We need to completely rethink how Americans receive benefits such as retirement and health care so that they’re universal, automatic, and portable. As you probably can tell by now, I love talking about this stuff. The point is, we have to think big and think different.
No matter what I do in the years ahead, I’ll be chasing down new policy ideas that I think could make a difference. Not every election will be so filled with venom, misinformation, resentments, and outside interference as this one was. Solutions are going to matter again in politics. Democrats must be ready when that day comes.
Making History
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
“I just want to show you this,” said David Muir, the young ABC News anchor, as he walked me to the window. “This is the crowd that’s waiting for you.”
It was late on Tuesday, June 7, 2016, the day of the final Democratic primaries. Muir and I were on the second floor of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a small room crowded with cameras, hot lights, and a TV crew making final arrangements for our interview. The window looked out onto a cavernous hangar that was packed with thousands of cheering people waving American flags and stomping their feet. In the middle stood an empty stage.