The 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang announced Thursday night at the third Democratic debate that he would hold a raffle to give 10 families $1,000 a month for a year.

"It's time to trust ourselves more than our politicians," Yang said in his opening statement. "My campaign will now give a Freedom Dividend of $12,000 per year to 10 families. This is how we will get our country working for us again, the American people."

The raffle, first reported by Politico, is set to begin online next week and give each family $1,000 a month. The program, which Yang calls the Freedom Dividend, is his flagship campaign proposal, which he wants to roll out to every American adult.

Yang, a businessman, is the main candidate in the race sounding the alarm about the effects of automation on the American economy, particularly how it could eliminate jobs in the trucking and retail sectors.

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The 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, a businessman who is running on a platform of giving every American adult a universal basic income of $1,000 a month, announced at the third Democratic debate that he would hold a raffle to give 10 families $12,000 over a year.

The raffle, first reported by Politico, is set to begin online next week and give each family $1,000 a month. The universal-basic-income program, which Yang calls the Freedom Dividend, is his flagship campaign proposal.

"It's time to trust ourselves more than our politicians," Yang said in his debate opening statement. "My campaign will now give a Freedom Dividend of $12,000 per year to 10 families. This is how we will get our country working for us again, the American people."

Yang argues that the money would not only help ameliorate economic inequality but would reward unpaid work like childcare and housework, boost innovation by providing entrepreneurs with more leeway to start new businesses, and give everyday workers more leverage to demand better working conditions from their employers.

Yang is the main candidate in the race sounding the alarm about the effects of automation on the American economy, particularly how it could eliminate jobs in the trucking and retail sectors.

Beyond the Freedom Dividend, Yang also advocates other progressive policies and expansive social programs including a single-payer "Medicare for All" healthcare system, free community college, and nationwide marijuana legalization.

Read more: Andrew Yang is running for president in 2020. Here's everything we know about the candidate and how he stacks up against the competition.

But Yang is through-and-through a capitalist and rejects the notion that a universal basic income constitutes socialism.

"This is not socialism — this is capitalism where income doesn't start at zero," Yang told CBS in March. "If you think about where Americans are going to spend this money, they're going to spend it at their local businesses, their Main Street economy."

Yang has risen among the 2020 field in recent months and has more than 200,000 unique donors thanks to his online base of supporters known as the #YangGang.

The Yang Gang has transformed Yang's longshot candidacy into a serious one, and Yang has now outlasted several US members of Congress and governors in the race.