Andrew Yang on Universal Basic Income
Andrew Yang wants to give every American $1,000 a month if he’s elected in 2020.
“My flagship proposal is a Freedom Dividend of $1,000 a month for every American adult starting at age 18,” he explained. “So that means that you would receive $1,000 a month, every month.”
Yang says the concept of a universal basic income has been around since the country’s founding. Thomas Paine was for it, calling it the citizen’s dividend, and Martin Luther King advocated for it in his book “Chaos or Community?” A bill implementing it even passed the House of Representatives twice in 1971.
Yang says that 44% of American jobs will be subject to automation in the next 20 to 30 years, which is why supplemental income should become law.
“The most common jobs in the U.S. economy are administrative and clerical, which includes call center workers, retail and sales, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation, and manufacturing,” he said. “Those five sectors are all gonna shrink, and that’s half of American jobs.”
To fund the Freedom Dividend, Yang says we must join every other advanced economy in the world and have a value-added tax that then gives the American public a tiny slice of extremely successful companies’ sales and progress.
“This is a trickle-up economy, and it starts with universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American adult starting in 2021 and that is I why I’m running for president,” he said.
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