Yang meeting with Greene County Democrats in Iowa 2/1/2019

When former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz teased the possibility of a run for President, I felt compelled to share my story as a Boomer a few years younger. Like Schultz, I went to college back in the good old days when you could pay off tuition debt with a secure, well-paying job that lasted perhaps until retirement. I earned an MBA in Finance, but had a passion for technology.

In the late nineties, I returned to my Northeast Ohio hometown, Cleveland, and accepted a job as a systems analyst for a major bank. Despite noticing I was often the only female in tech meetings, I felt confident I had made an excellent career choice. That is, until the dotcom bust of 2000 hit Ohio particularly hard. I found myself out of a job in an industry I believed was recession-proof. Banks don’t go out of business anymore. I was able to relocate to Seattle where eventually I landed a position in the IT department at Washington Mutual Bank. I was an employee with good benefits until September 25, 2008 when it became the largest bank failure in US history. I spent my meager severance pay enrolling in the local university’s post-baccalaureate certificate courses to expand my skill set. I dropped out when I realized they were hastily slapped together as a knee-jerk response to record unemployment. Employers like Schultz’s Starbucks weren’t interested in an older, white female when the major outsourcing firms could supply labor at a much lower cost.

Many years and increasing debt later, a childhood friend living in the DC area offered my dog and me a room in her attic and the chance to find opportunity working in the federal sector. It was 2016 and a new administration was coming in. Although not the right one for jobs. The local state employment agency in Maryland said I qualified for a federally-funded $10M program to re-skill the long-term unemployed into technology jobs in hot careers such as cyber security and biotechnology. I still recall meeting with my employment coach, who based on her LinkedIn profile, never worked in those fields or for that matter, as a career counselor. I requested data on job placement rates once candidates went through the two-year commitment and was ignored. Ten million dollars bought employment for about 10 people on the staff it seemed.

I was heading into the decade of traditional retirement age as someone falling into homelessness from a middle-class existence. I filed for personal bankruptcy, justifying the shame by reminding myself our 45th President opted for business bankruptcy numerous times. A financial windfall in the form of a personal liability settlement for a dog attack came my way. I used it to relocate again to Maine, now my voter registration state. Living the definition of insanity, it occurred to me I was soon becoming eligible to begin receiving Social Security benefits at 62. It wasn’t sufficient to support myself in the US. Like so many older workers in my financial predicament, I looked to South America.

Today I live well on my Social Security income in a pretty town in southern Ecuador. I enjoy my new Ecuadorian amigos. I employ the local youth to care for my dog. It’s not paradise. Even though I can afford to live in the wealthiest barrio, I experience water outages at least once a month. I run errands in town and am proud I have relative abundance to be able to give my US dollars to the increasing numbers of Venezuelan refugees begging on my city’s streets. Life here provides me with greater appreciation of Andrew’s pledge to reduce scarcity by increasing abundance, by moving us towards human-centered capitalism as the solution for the inevitable job loss due to automation.

I work as a volunteer for Andrew Yang’s campaign for a simple reason: he understands that punch-in-the-gut feeling of scarcity felt by millions like me who were left behind by the so-called recovery. Many shouted their pain by electing Donald Trump, yet the coastal elites were deaf. Andrew is unafraid to have the frightful conversation that more will end up with my fate much sooner than retirement age. The near-future advances in artificial intelligence applied to increasing levels of automation tell employees they no longer are considered a company’s most valued asset. He refuses to trot out the trope of retraining millions of displaced workers as the panacea, as if such an effort would scale to the numbers that will be displaced during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

I work for Andrew Yang’s campaign because for me, the Freedom Dividend might be enough to allow me to make my home in the United States again. What do you believe Andrew’s policies can do for you?