Presidential candidate Andrew Yang speaks Friday at the Milwaukee Depot in Jefferson. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALD

Yang touts universal income

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Andrew Yang talks like a guy who’s seen “The Terminator” a few too many times.

His vision of a near-future if left unchecked is pretty dismal — robots, software and artificial intelligence will have put a third of all Americans out of work.

Permanently.

“We’re going to be heading for a disastrous future,” predicted Yang, a 2020 presidential candidate.

It’s a safe bet that no one else you’ll meet in the coming days and months in the buildup to the Iowa Caucuses will have a stump speech anywhere as thought-provoking and, yeah, terrifying, as Yang, a 44-year-old entrepreneur and father of two from New York running as a Democrat.

With the countdown to the caucuses underway — only 300-some more days ’til Feb. 3, 2020! — Yang visited Jefferson on Friday morning, where he spoke to about 20 people at the Milwaukee Depot as part of a push through west-central Iowa.

He also toured the building just off the Square in Jefferson under renovation to house a software company, Pillar Technology.

It’s clear that Yang, introduced Friday as “Andrew Wang” by Greene County Democratic Party chairwoman Chris Henning, has a long road ahead of him.

But Yang may have a leg up on some of his Democratic competitors, the likes of which could reach double-digits.

“How many people have heard that Andrew Yang wants to give away $1,000 to everybody?” he asked.

Hands went up.

Donald Trump won the White House with an “America first” platform. Yang, however, may be the first candidate to run on a platform of “humanity first.”

Once you stop with the “Terminator”/Skynet jokes long enough to hear the guy out, it starts to become appallingly clear that Yang may be sounding the alarm on something the nation’s corporate overlords would rather you not think about.

“Our leaders are completely asleep at the switch,” Yang said. “We’re about to automate away the most common jobs in America.”

Leadership in both major parties, he said, won’t even acknowledge the fundamental issue tearing apart American society.

Trump’s rise to the White House wasn’t built on racism, Russia or Facebook, according to Yang.

“All of that is dead wrong,” he explained. “The reason Donald Trump is president is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs.”

Iowa has lost 40,000 jobs to automation, he said.

What began with deregulation and the decimation of manufacturing has entered a new phase: the loss of brick-and-mortar retail.

“Why are your stores closing?” Yang asked. “There’s a one-word answer: Amazon.”

The next phase will be self-driving cars and trucks, he said.

“I have friends in Silicon Valley who say they’re 98 percent away from self-driving trucks,” he said.

Trucking is the most common occupation in more than two dozen states, Yang said.

The average trucker, he said, is a 49-year-old man with a high school diploma. Many are in debt because they took out loans to buy their trucks. And the majority, Yang said, are ex-military.

“Many of these truckers are going to show up at state capitals with their trucks and their guns to protest the robots that have taken their jobs,” Yang predicted.

Yang’s solution isn’t to declare war on robots, but to provide every American 18 and older with a universal basic income of $1,000 a month, no strings attached, to supplement existing income.

His “Freedom Dividend” would be paid for by consolidating some existing welfare programs and implementing a “value-added tax” of 10 percent on companies that benefit most from automation.

A value-added tax at half the European level, according to Yang’s website, would generate $800 billion in new revenue.

He said his plan fits “seamlessly” into capitalism.

Amazon could go right on selling everything from tires to Funyuns, but a monthly Freedom Dividend would allow all Americans to face the future together.

“We need to build a trickle-up economy,” he said. “This is the only way we can win in this era.”

He called a guaranteed income “a deeply American idea” that originated with Founding Father Thomas Paine. Along the way, according to Yang, the concept has found support among such political polar opposites as Martin Luther King Jr. and President Richard Nixon.

A guaranteed income, Yang said, was passed by the House under Nixon in 1970, only to die in the Senate because Democrats wanted a higher guaranteed income.

Since 1982, the state of Alaska has distributed an annual dividend to its residents from mineral royalties. The annual payment has been as high in recent years as $2,072 and as low as $878.

“What they’re doing in Alaska,” Yang said, “we can do this for Iowa and everyone else across the country.”

“It’s wildly popular in a deep red state,” he added.

Yang also advocates for Medicare-for-all, saying “we’re getting gouged” for the price of health care.

He acknowledges that his Freedom Dividend, his top priority if elected, faces a hard fight.

“There are corporate interests that are very much going to fight me,” Yang said.

But even the most fervent of capitalists would have to admit that something isn’t right when Greene County boasts an unemployment rate of 2.1 percent, yet 49.9 percent of kids at Greene County Elementary School are on free and reduced lunch.

When asked about racism, Yang sees even that as an economic issue — not an educational one — noting that 78 percent of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and 57 percent couldn’t pay an unexpected bill.

“You have the mindset of scarcity,” he said.

Financial insecurity breeds racism, he said, and even shapes public opinion about what to do about climate change.

“I can’t pay a bill,” Yang said, “I don’t care about the penguins.”

Whether the time is right for a candidate like Yang remains to be seen.

As he said afterward, “I don’t talk in ideas. I talk in common sense.”

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