Democratic candidate Andrew Yang on beating Trump and universal income

Presidential candidate Andrew Yang says he can do what
President Trump can’t.
Andrew
Yang

• Andrew Yang, a long-time
  entrepreneur-turned-politician, wants President Donald Trump’s
  job in 2020. 
• He believes in a universal basic income, and supports
  reforms to prepare the United States for the revolutions in
  artificial intelligence and autonomy still to come.
• He’s probably also the first candidate to accept
  donations in the form of cryptocurrency. 

If you ask presidential candidate
Andrew Yang to talk about the future, he’ll start with with truck
drivers.

The 43-year-old

entrepreneur-turned-politician

is a ball of statistics on the
pending driverless car revolution. Autonomous vehicles are
already on the road today, poised to rise across private and
commercial sectors. This will see personal convenience soar to
new heights, but will lay carnage to the contemporary trucking
industry in the process.

“The average truck driver is a
49-year-old male with a high school education and one year of
college. There are 3.5 million of them in America; it’s the most
common job in 29 states.” Yang said. “If you project what happens
in the next five to ten years, it’s going to be disastrous for
these communities.” He cited “another 5 million Americans” who
work in the truck stops, motels, and diners that serve the
truckers and their vehicles. What happens to the local economies
when those trucks stop coming, he asks — and what happens to
their politics?

Yang’s pre-politics career in
business cuts across education, healthcare software, mobile
technology, and nonprofit fundraising. President Barack Obama
named him a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship
in 2015 —  indeed, Yang presents a sharp ideological
contrast to the current US president.

“Donald Trump gives entrepreneurs
a bad name because he’s a marketing charlatan, not a business
organization builder,” he said. “I believe that I have a lot of
the qualities Trump pretended to have.”






As President of the United States, Yang wants
to flex his business sense to bring about a program called the
Freedom Dividend, a basic income program to help dampen
automation’s impact on human life and work.

He’s given a lot of thought to
our unknown future as a suite of emergent technologies spin into
high gear. He suggests that the rise of AI will force us to
reexamine what we mean by the word “work,” what we value as a
society, and how we want our economy to function. He acknowledges
that it could be a massive problem, but “it could also be a
massive opportunity.”

Yang is campaigning right now for
your 2020 presidential vote. A lightly edited transcript of our
interview with him follows.

BUSINESS INSIDER: Isn’t it too soon to be running for
President?

ANDREW YANG:
It
isn’t too soon! I’m not even the first one to declare. One person
declared before me, a congressman from Maryland named

John
Delaney

. There are no
formal regulations on timing, it’s more tradition than anything.
I think that right now we are going through the greatest
technological and economic shift in human history, and our
political leadership is completely out to lunch on it. The only
requirements to run are the Constitutional requirements — to be a
natural born citizen, 35 years or older — and I’m running to
win.

Trump won in 2016 because we
automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the swing states that he needed to
carry in order to win. We’re about to do the same thing again,
this time to people who work in retail, trucking, transportation,
call centers, fast food, and throughout the economy. Artificial
intelligence is going to do more and more of what humans
presently do. Most of our political class won’t even acknowledge
that this is the central challenge of this era, and it’s about to
ramp up.

BI: You’re seeking the Democratic nomination. What does
your platform look like?

AY:
The core of
my campaign is the


Freedom Dividend

, in
which every American adult between the ages of 18 and 64 would
receive $1,000 per month. You can’t fight job automation the same
way you fight climate change, by asking people to sacrifice or be
more vigilant about the resources they consume. We have to go the
other direction and spread the bounty of automation and new
technology as broadly and quickly as possible. Capitalism
functions much better when people have money to spend, and right
now 59% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $500
expense.

The Roosevelt Institute found
that a basic income of $1,000 a month would grow the economy by
$2.5 trillion per year and create 4.5 million new jobs. We’d be
rolling out the Freedom Dividend within my first year as
President, because that’s what I’d be elected to do.

BI: Universal basic income has been a hip idea for a
while, but it seems like it never goes anywhere in America. Where
does the resistance come from?

AY:
The United
States has had a basic income program for the past 36 years.
Alaska’s petroleum dividend passed the House of Representatives
in 1971 under Nixon, and it gives each resident of the state
between

$1,000 and $2,000

a year for life. It’s improved
children’s nutrition, created jobs, lowered income inequality,
and remains wildly popular in a deep red state. It was sold by a
Republican governor as a way to keep money out of the hands of
government and in the hands of the people. Anyone who thinks this
isn’t possible just isn’t paying attention to our history.

The fundamental resistance is
born of a misplaced sense of scarcity. It’s easy to say, “Hey, we
can’t afford that. The money has to come from somewhere, and it
would bankrupt the economy.” But this is nonsense on its face.
Our economy is now $19 trillion per year, up $4 trillion in the
last 10 years alone. We can easily afford a dividend of $1,000
per American adult between the ages of 18-64. There are four
mechanisms to pay for it in my plan, and one of them is a new
value added tax for companies that benefit the most from
automation. This is necessary because income taxes are terrible
at generating revenue from AI, software, and machines. The
beneficiaries tend to be large global tech companies that are
great at reducing their tax bill.

BI: Are you the first presidential candidate to accept
cryptocurrency donations? Would you bring any formal
cryptocurrency regulation to the United States?

YA:
I believe
I’m the first candidate to accept crypto donations. We looked
into the regulations and as long as we gather all the identifying
information for each contribution, then it’s perfectly fine.
Political campaigns can accept contributions of any type as long
as you record the value. We could accept a donation of ham
sandwiches, for example.

Under my administration, we’d
have a coherent set of rules for cryptocurrency, because it’s a
bit of the Wild West right now. I’m pessimistic that this
administration is going to grapple with the problem meaningfully,
but there’s a lot of experimentation going on. Lack of coherent
regulation isn’t curbing people from experimenting and innovating
with the blockchain and finding new implementations for
it.

BI: What do you think about a national
cryptocurrency?

YA:I think a
national cryptocurrency could be a phenomenal idea that makes a
lot of sense, but first we need to create more meaningful
touchpoints in the economy for people to participate.  Part
of my campaign is that we need a new “social currency,” backed by
the federal government and worth real money. This currency maps
to various positive social behaviors that we want to encourage
more of, things like taking care of the elderly, nurturing
children, volunteering in a community, or improving the
environment. The idea is based on something called
“timebanking” that’s been in effect in a couple hundred
communities around the US for a number of years. We need a way to
recognize and reinforce helpful behavior. This would most likely
look like a smartphone app.

BI: Generally speaking,
what can people do to prepare for your vision of the
future?

YA:
Our
conception of work needs to become much broader. Let’s say my
wife is at home right now with our two young boys, which she is.
The market values that at zero and does not see that as a job. If
she were hired to take care of someone else’s kids, then that
would be a job. Right now we base our notion of “work” on the
market: you get paid for jobs, but not for non-jobs. The problem
here is that the market is going to value human labor less and
less.

Those previously mentioned 3.5
million truck drivers haven’t changed as humans. They didn’t
suddenly forget how to drive a truck. It’s just that now the
truck drives itself, and the drivers are going to watch their
labor value go from $45,000 a year to near zero.