New Orleans and Birmingham Yang Gangs in action

(This is a response to the letter from four Southern mayors to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on how to win the South in the primaries.)

Dear Mayors:

We are four regional volunteer organizers for the Andrew Yang 2020 presidential campaign. We represent a diverse and rapidly expanding base, with new supporters joining us daily from all sides of the political spectrum. We appreciate your efforts to bring attention to the needs of Southern communities, and to make sure that we are not forgotten in this race. We too are deeply invested in the upcoming election, and we believe that the Andrew Yang campaign presents an opportunity to completely change the direction of the political climate and economic reality in the South, and in the nation as a whole. If you would give us the opportunity, we would like to present our case for why our campaign is the one that speaks most directly to your concerns, and the concerns of us, your constituencies.

We should make it clear from the start that we cannot directly address every concern that was raised in your original letter. We are not official campaign staff and Yang does not have public policies on every issue that was mentioned. However, we have done our best to address as many of your overarching concerns as directly as we can, and hope that you find this letter a compelling case for how Yang’s policies can help the South live up to its enormous potential, in both economic and human terms.

If you haven’t heard much about Andrew Yang, he is an entrepreneur and founder of the nonprofit Venture For America, which trains recent graduates to work in startups, creating jobs in emerging cities including Birmingham and New Orleans. He is running for president on the idea that Trump won in 2016 by appealing to voters in swing states that had experienced massive job losses due to automation. In Yang’s view, much more automation is on the way that will destroy many more jobs than it creates. His solution to this is the “Freedom Dividend,” a universal basic income (UBI) of $1000 a month given to every America adult, no strings attached, for life, paid for by a value-added tax (VAT). He is polling in the top five candidates for the Democratic primary, and has growing support from both sides of the aisle.

Let’s now address the points in your original letter. Housing is an obvious place to start — not only is the Freedom Dividend enough to pay rent in many places, it also makes people much more mobile. Moving is expensive, which means that even if someone becomes aware of better or more affordable housing, it can be difficult to pursue it. Once people are receiving the dividend, though, they will now have the resources to make that move. It will also increase rates of home ownership — if you save your dividend for a year, you have enough for a down payment on a house. As a two-adult household, you can do it in half the time. There is also the issue of the displacement of people being priced out of their neighborhoods. Yang believes that we need to do everything we can to federalize incentives for housing developers to build for the people who already live in those neighborhoods, instead of building for wealthier people who would move in and displace them. He also hopes to work with localities to relax zoning ordinances for the purpose of increasing the development of affordable housing. Yang also proposes a $1 trillion infrastructure investment initiative. This includes expanding the fiber-optic network to include rural areas so that 98% of Americans have access to high-speed Internet.

Investment in education and workforce development is strongly needed. In the view of the Yang campaign, there has been an overprescription of college to the detriment of vocational education, resulting in high student debt and underemployment for college grads. A Yang presidency would increase funding to vocational programs in public schools, expand the definition of vocational training to include IT and computer-science related skills, make community college free, and begin a public education campaign championing vocational jobs and education. Yang also plans to forgive large swaths of the student debt that currently saddles many Americans. Furthermore, the dividend will have a massive impact on K-12 education. Studies have shown that between 60–70% of student outcomes are determined outside of the classroom. The dividend will work on that side of the equation, improving nutrition and reducing stress levels in the home so that when students show up to school they are relaxed and ready to learn.

While we are on the subject of health, Yang’s climate plan will resuscitate the quality of our air and water, providing a proper foundation for our people’s physical and mental health. The Freedom Dividend is also an obvious game changer when it comes to access to quality food for people in the South. An extra injection of that much cash into the hands of every adult in a community has the potential to vastly reduce food deserts and improve nutrition. This is a good time to mention Yang’s plan for an “economic scorecard.” Yang believes that the country has focused too much on GDP and the unemployment rate, which are two extremely misleading statistics when it comes to actually measuring how we’re doing as a people. Yang believes GDP and unemployment are highly flawed ways of measuring our national wellbeing, and plans to focus more on stats like labor force participation rate, life expectancy, graduation rates and nutrition. He will then present the changes in these statistics at his State of the Union, as the first president ever to include a PowerPoint presentation in his state of the union address.

The position of the Yang campaign on the war on drugs issue is clear — we should legalize marijuana and mass-pardon every single inmate that is incarcerated for a non-violent marijuana offense. Yang has stated that he plans to pardon these inmates on 4/20 and high-five them as they walk out of prison. He also wishes to decriminalize opiates so we can begin dealing with the opioid crisis as a public health issue, instead of incarcerating people the way we do now. Beyond drug offenses, many of the crimes that lead to jailtime occur as a result of economic desperation. With the Freedom Dividend, people will know that they and their children will not go hungry and will feel less pressure to break the law. On top of that, people will not be eligible for the Freedom Dividend while they are incarcerated, incentivizing people further to stay out of jail.

As the son of immigrants, Yang believes that immigrants are a vital part of American growth and dynamism. It makes no sense, logistically or ethically, to try to deport all undocumented immigrants in the country. As such, the campaign proposes to provide a new tier of long-term permanent residency for anyone who has been here illegally for a substantial amount of time so that they can come out of the shadows, enter the formal economy, and become full members of the community. Though it should include a longer waiting period than those who came here legally, these individuals should have a path to full citizenship.

The Freedom Dividend would be highly impactful to women throughout the nation. Stay-at-home parents and caregivers, most of whom are women, are currently not valued by our economy. The dividend would finally recognize the immeasurable value that these people give to our society. Furthermore, many women suffer in abusive relationships because they lack the financial security to sustain themselves if they were to leave. By providing a basic income of $1000 a month, women who are currently suffering will immediately be able to move out on their own and no longer be trapped by financial dependence upon abusive partners. The same can be said for work situations where a woman is being abused or harassed by a superior. Workers in general will become much more difficult to exploit, as they know they will not starve if they leave their job.

A universal basic income will allow us to finally start to address the economic disparity between racial groups in this country, something that has particular historical resonance in the South. Martin Luther King championed a universal basic income in his last ever book, “Where do we go from here — Chaos or Community,” and he was in fact championing UBI up to the day of his assassination. However, we do recognize that the Freedom Dividend is not a panacea, and that it will require continuous tweaking and improvement. There is the question, for example, of single mothers, who should clearly receive more assistance than an affluent childless couple. We realize too that, even with the implementation of the dividend, much more must be done in order to directly tackle the question of racial inequality. We should make it clear, therefore, that the Freedom Dividend is not the end goal. It is simply a starting point, a foundation that must be laid in order to more directly tackle specific systemic injustices and inequalities going forward.

Lastly, we would like to inform you of a couple of Yang’s policies that were not in your original letter, but that you still may find interesting:

Local politics only works if people can rely on local journalism. However, local papers have been struggling due to a decrease in demand for classified advertisements owing to a rise in websites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. As such, Yang wishes to institute a Local Journalism Fund program that will make grants of between $25,000 and $250,000 to local media outlets, non-profits, libraries, governments and public-private partnerships to catalyze transitions to new models of support.

Under current Supreme Court jurisprudence, individuals can contribute huge amounts to influence elections and politicians. Amending the constitution to fix this could take years, and our democracy is being corrupted now. Yang suggests we combat this with a proposal called “Democracy Dollars” — a voucher of $100 for every American that can only be spent as donations to political campaigns. This would flush out lobbyist cash by a factor of 8 to 1, and make it so that politicians don’t need to worry about pleasing anyone but their constituents in order to make it into office.

In closing, we believe strongly that Andrew Yang and his campaign are the best bet for the South, and for the cities that you lead. Yang has received much less press in large media outlets than one would expect for someone polling as high as he is. As such, most of his best interviews are in videos online, and we strongly suggest that you take a look at some of them. As for us, we will continue doing our part to energize and inform the citizens in our area, and get out the vote. We appreciate your time and energy in writing your original letter, and likewise believe that the voice of the South will be heard loud and clear in the 2020 primaries. You can reach us at birmingham.yang.gang@gmail.com Thank you for your service to our cities.

Jennifer Bailey

Member, Columbia Yang Gang

Columbia, South Carolina

John Huynh

Regional Organizer, New Orleans Yang Gang

New Orleans, Louisiana

Kelsey Holleman

Member, Jackson Yang Gang

Jackson, Mississippi

David Kennell

Secondary Contact, Birmingham Yang Gang

Birmingham, Alabama