ARLINGTON — Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico proposed a sweeping economic agenda on Wednesday that called for repealing recent GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and enacting universal childcare, among other policies meant to lower everyday costs.
“We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis,” Talarico said during a nearly 30-minute speech to an audience of 1,300 people in Arlington. “For too many of our neighbors — for too many Texans — the American dream has become an American nightmare.”
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Throughout his campaign, Talarico has stuck to a populist economic message that links rising costs to billionaire political influence and an economy he says is tilted in favor of the ultrawealthy over working people. Wednesday’s address kicked off a monthlong tour to promote his first detailed rollout of his proposals to reverse course, under the banner of what he is calling the “New American Dream.”
“It’s time for us to come together across these manufactured divisions, to take on the people at the top who have been screwing us over for far too long,” Talarico said. “That is the movement that we are building here in Texas. This is not a politics of fear. This is not a politics of division. This is a politics of unity, a politics of friendship, a politics of love. This new kind of politics can change our state. It can change our country.”
Affordability and cost-of-living concerns have consistently topped voters’ list of priorities in public polling. Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent, unveiled his own economic agenda last week, dubbed “Protecting the Texas Promise” and centered on tax deductions.
Both candidates have sought to claim the mantle of reviving the American dream in their economic rollouts. But while Paxton cast Washington, the Biden administration and regulations as the culprit for high prices, Talarico took aim at an economy corrupted by “billionaire megadonors and their puppet politicians” as the root cause.
“Republicans and some Democrats sold the false Gospel of trickle-down economics: that the best way to grow the economy is to let the rich get richer and forget about everybody else,” he said. “Trickle-down economics isn’t a theory. It’s theft.”
Talarico said his proposals, taken together, aim to recreate a “new American dream” for people “working hard and playing by the rules. He defined it as “being able to afford a house big enough to raise a family in, a quality education for yourself and your kids, a retirement that is comfortable and secure and most importantly — time doing what you love with the people you love.”
The key tenets of Talarico’s agenda include:
- raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay;
- repealing tax breaks in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill for the top 1% of earners and directing the money to a “cost-of-living tax cut;”
- canceling medical debt;
- cutting the national deficit by “closing billionaire tax loopholes, cracking down on tax cheats and ending forever wars in the Middle East;”
- passing universal childcare and paid family leave;
- permanently expanding the child tax credit;
- providing down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers;
- slashing regulations to allow new homes to be built faster;
- investing in renewable energy and working to “partner” with the oil and gas industry” in an “all-of-the-above” energy approach;
- providing grants to entrepreneurs who “don’t know any big investors;”
- and establishing an “AI dividend” that would give every U.S. citizen a stake in American AI companies.
If elected, Talarico has also vowed to pursue an anti-corruption package to ban super PACs, corporate PACs, partisan gerrymandering and congressional stock trading.
“I will fight to unrig this economy,” Talarico said. “I will fight to lower your costs and raise your pay. And unlike Ken Paxton, I will fight to put your hard-earned money where it belongs: in your pocket.
Paxton’s economic plan, meanwhile, is centered around a series of tax deductions for healthcare, housing and family-related expenses. Those include a $25,000 deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses, a $50,000 deduction for first-time homebuyers and an additional $50,000 tax break on down payments for people moving into a new primary residence.
The attorney general has pitched his agenda as a solution to affordability woes created by Washington — an anti-establishment message echoing that of Talarico and other Democrats running against the Republican-controlled federal government. Paxton, who is campaigning with Trump’s endorsement, blamed high prices on the White House’s prior occupant.
“We know that the cost of housing under the Biden administration skyrocketed,” Paxton said Tuesday at the first stop of his own weeklong tour promoting his economic agenda. “The cost of building it, and then interest rates have made it very difficult for many of our citizens to afford housing. And so we are going to make it easier for people to buy houses.”
Paxton opened his tour in Allen in a display of post-primary GOP unity. He was introduced by hometown state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican who helped oversee the Texas House’s 2023 impeachment against the attorney general and who was sharply critical of him during the primary.
But on Tuesday night, Leach told hundreds of attendees that the stakes were too high to sit out November and that he would vote for Paxton.
“We either fight and we vote to protect and safeguard the great state of Texas, or we stay home, we stay quiet, we don’t mobilize and we allow the radical liberal progressives, who’ve ruined California and New York, to take root and to take leadership here in the great Lone Star State,” he said.
At the opening stops of his economic tour, Paxton also weaved in his usual stump speech attacking Talarico on culture war issues, including over his vote against a bill to require K-12 students to play on sports teams corresponding with their biological sex.
“He did everything he could to create an environment where we trans kids, and of course, now he says he’s not for that,” Paxton said. “He’s also voted for boys in girls’ sports. I know that Texans don’t like that.”
Talarico has largely ignored the attacks and continued to do so Wednesday, focusing beyond the policy details on stories of working Texans he met on the campaign trail. Among them was an airport worker in Houston, named Augusta, who Talarico said spends 10-hour shifts cleaning planes without air conditioning but struggles to afford her everyday needs.
“Augusta is working hard, she is taking responsibility, she is caring for those around her. What kind of country are we if we let a woman like that go down?” Talarico said. “In the U.S. Senate, we’re going to have Augusta’s back.”