Revitalizing the Economy: Harnessing Technological Innovation for Growth

Migration note

This issue is a faithful port of the 2024 platform's "Revitalizing the Economy" plank into the new format, not a fresh policy pass. The content below represents the original document's argument and proposals; it hasn't yet been independently re-verified against current 2026 economic data or re-argued against current opposing views the way the Artificial Intelligence domain's issues have been. See the Research tier for what that means concretely.

The original argument

The source document frames this as a forward-looking rather than reactive economic policy: "we don't just want an economy that bounces back; we want an economy that leaps forward." It identifies automation as a double-edged force, bringing innovation while leaving behind workers not equipped to evolve with it, and treats the pandemic as an event that exposed pre-existing inequality rather than created it. Its critique of prior federal responses is specific: the 2009 recovery act is credited with stabilizing the economy but faulted for not building toward future innovation; the 2021 infrastructure law is credited with modernizing physical infrastructure but faulted for stopping short of what 21st-century competitiveness requires ("we need more than just roads and bridges").

Its three proposals are stated as a connected sequence rather than independent items: STEM-centered education first (building the skills base), R&D investment second (building what those skilled workers can then do), and universal connectivity third (making sure the first two aren't limited to people who already have digital access). The document explicitly ties the connectivity piece to both rural and urban equity ("whether rural or urban"), not just a rural-specific broadband argument.

What's happening in 2025–2026: the fight is narrower than it looks

The party's original 2024 argument was written before a useful real-world test case existed: does official Washington behave the way this plank assumes when a budget fight arrives? The answer turned out to be more reassuring than expected. The Trump administration's FY2026 budget proposed cutting the National Science Foundation by roughly half, NIH by over 40%, and NASA by nearly a quarter: a scale of cut that would have gutted Proposal 2 entirely. A Republican-controlled Congress substantially rejected it: NSF ultimately took only a 3.4% reduction, with both parties' appropriators pushing back on the executive's request. That's evidence the bipartisan R&D consensus this plank assumes isn't wishful thinking. It held under pressure.

Broadband is where a live, current fight exists, and it's about mechanics, not goals. In 2025, the administration rewrote the $42 billion BEAD broadband program to be "technology-neutral," opening it to satellite and fixed-wireless internet, not just fiber, and stripped Biden-era conditions on labor standards and rate regulation, forcing states to resubmit their build-out plans. Republican committee chairs praised this as cutting red tape; Democratic ranking members called it a costly, year-delaying forced restart. Both sides still fund the same underlying build-out. CHIPS Act implementation tells a similar story: despite Trump having called it a "bad deal" as a candidate, his administration has continued it (with renegotiated contract terms, not cancellation) rather than moved to kill it.

The tension this plank's own platform-mate exposes

Proposal 1's STEM-centered education push has always emphasized fields like coding and AI specifically, reasonable in 2024, when this plank was written without the benefit of this platform's own later labor-market research. AI-11, drafted afterward with evidentiary discipline, documents a measured decline in entry-level employment concentrated in exactly the AI-exposed occupations that a coding-and-software-focused STEM push funnels young people toward, while identifying skilled trades as a sector facing a worker shortage and comparatively low near-term AI exposure. Left unexamined, that's a checkable inconsistency inside this platform's own body of evidence, not just an outside critique: touting STEM-for-coding as the future while this platform's own AI-11 research shows that's exactly where entry-level jobs are currently contracting, without equally emphasizing the sector that's hiring and comparatively insulated. Proposal 5 is the fix: not abandoning coding and software education, which remain valuable, but refusing to let this plank implicitly contradict AI-11's own findings by omission.