My Case for Andrew Yang

How the longer-than-longshot candidate made a name for himself

Citizens of the United States of America have finally heard the ‘longer-than-longshot’ candidate, as the New York Times put it, speak. CNN hosted the second Democratic presidential primary debates with ten qualifying candidates each night. The highest polling candidates included Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on night one. Front runner Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg maintained the lead among Americans on the second night, as well as Andrew Yang. While the candidates on stage were attacking each other for various reasons, one in particular didn’t have a single one to throw at another. That candidate is entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Isn’t this a bad thing though? Shouldn’t presidential candidates be criticizing each other’s policies and ideas? While this is certainly necessary in politics, the Democratic party embarrassed themselves in the way they carped at Joe Biden that night. At the beginning, they were pulling it off but it later appeared as more of a sort of premeditated collective effort to bring down the candidate polling higher than his critics. It became clear that the intended outcome wasn’t a success when post-debate polls came out that still have Biden leading by a significant number.

Yang, on the contrary, called out what he noticed the other candidates as well as the moderators were turning the debate into during his closing statement: a reality TV show. He cited their obviously rehearsed attack lines as a prime example of this during the debate in Detroit. Yang does not tend to be an overbearing critic of his political colleagues. He has also argued very reasonably that we ought to stop signaling our outrage when President Trump simply does what he’s consistently done since he ran for office in 2015: saying and tweeting outrageous things. Yang states that this allows President Trump to control the narrative when we should be focusing on the problems that got him elected in the first place instead.

Why did we elect Donald Trump?

Since the day President Trump was elected, his critics have hypothesized how they suspect he was able to make his way into what is arguably the highest office in the world. Many of their suspicions ranged from racism and hate to Americans’ frustration with political correctness and identity politics. Other reasons include Russia, sexism, Facebook, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. While most of these concerns were contributors, the primary reason that Donald Trump was elected as president is because the states that had the largest number of jobs lost to automation became swing states for Trump. These states include Pensilvania, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa. Yang explains this correlation in his popular Joe Rogan interview:

If you look at the voter district data on a district by district basis, there is a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots and the movement towards Trump. We blasted away four million manufacturing jobs in the swing states and Donald Trump is our president. So I went to people in Washington DC and I was like, “Okay guys, what are we going to do? We are in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country. And the third inning has brought us Donald Trump. The fourth, fifth and sixth innings are going to be horrific. What are we going to do?” And then the answers I got were somewhere between disappointing and horrifying. If you go to mainstream politicians and are like, “what are we going to do,” the answers I got were literally: 1: We cannot talk about that. 2: We should study that, and 3: We must educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future. When I was like, “Hey, we are terrible at that by the numbers,” they said “I guess we will learn to get better at it then.”

A Problem of Our Time

If you were told that there is one issue that is already causing great distress among Americans that nobody is addressing, skepticism would be sensible since we hear these false narratives all the time from politicians. “Now that it is election time and I am running for office, there is suddenly one issue that is so conveniently urgent that I am addressing. Vote for me!” This time is different though; the problem is real. And politicians in Washington are not going to solve it for us. The most common jobs in our economy are going to continue to be automated away by companies such as Amazon, Google and Apple who are investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence (AI). Replacing workers with AI is highly efficient for companies because money only needs to be spent on it once. Robots don’t need to be paid a wage or to receive benefits such as healthcare. They don’t have children or want to take time off. It is in a business’ interest to invest in automation rather than wasting money on an employee who may not even do the job nearly as well as a robot in the first place. As technology improves, robots will only get cheaper and the incentive to eliminate all employees will be even greater than ever before. Our labor participation rate is currently struggling to stay above 60% — lower than it has been in decades. This is exactly what is going to happen increasingly to what is projected to be about 1/3 of Americans and their trucking, retail and fast food jobs in the next 10 to 12 years.

The Freedom Dividend is Yang’s version of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in which every American adult will receive $1,000 a month, no questions asked. There are many observable benefits to implementing a system of this nature into one’s country. Firstly, it encourages one to find work. Skeptics of UBI often charge the opposite; that having a capitalist system that doesn’t start at zero would somehow disincentivize people from working. This is false. In fact, studies show that the only people who work less under these circumstances are mothers who recently had a child and kids in school. On the other hand, individuals who receive welfare benefits often choose not to work because if they did, they’d lose their benefits, leaving them worse off than they were prior to finding a job. This is not a functional way to help people. The Freedom Dividend is a constant and can not be taken away without a constitutional amendment. As an American citizen, you are guaranteed a dividend on a monthly basis, regardless of circumstances.

This dividend would also help with citizens’ mental and physical health as well as with social relationships by reducing the effects of financial instability, decreasing the likelihood of developing a disease and eliminating a sizable chunk of domestic violence and child abuse. One benefit to UBI that I found very interesting is that it helps maintain one’s functional cognitive ability. Intelligence is important to the lives of human beings in the 21st century. Psychologists have found that IQ is an even better predictor of important life outcomes such as the job that one finds themselves in and their financial situation than personality trait conscientiousness is. Financial insecurity has been found to reduce one’s functional IQ by about 13 points (about one standard deviation). This is a major problem when 78% of the country are living paycheck-to-paycheck and around two quarters of the country couldn’t afford an unexpected $500 bill. There is some controversy around this intelligence research so I asked multiple well-known psychologists what their views are as I will discuss in the ‘Controversy & Criticism’ section.

If you are wondering if an economic system like the Freedom Dividend has ever been tried before, you aren’t alone. This is among the most common questions that come up in a discussion like this. Not only have versions of it been tried before, but in the state of Alaska (a republican-majority state with a republican governor), every citizen receives between one and two thousand dollars each year. It’s had an enormously positive impact on their community. On top of that, there have been hundreds of research papers published on UBI in the meantime, as well as data showing a decline in hospitalization, crime and increased nutrition. None of which are at the cost of hours spent at work or suggest an increase in drug and alcohol use. Here is a long list of UBI programs and cash transfer experiments listed on Yang’s website.

Alaska actually is able to afford a dividend for its citizens because of the oil they have and technology has become the oil of the 21st century for the United States. It is how we are able to fund something on such a large scale. Andrew Yang is proposing adding a Value-Added Tax of 10% to every amazon transaction as well as every robot truck mile, every uber mile, every google search, and to every large company that is not paying much of anything in taxes, let alone nothing at all like Amazon.

This is not an additional $1,000 on top of one’s current welfare benefits, it would be the choice of the American in question whether they think that they would succeed more with one or the other, accompanied with a single-payer system. The welfare overlap also helps to pay for the Freedom Dividend by what is projected to be roughly $600 billion. Reduced poverty expenses and the impact the policy will have on economic growth will also pitch in a combined total of $800 billion. Whether or not we can afford a version of Universal Basic Income is the wrong question. The right question is whether we want to adapt to our changing economy.

MATH

I titled this section ‘MATH’ partially because it’s Yang’s campaign slogan (and an acronym for ‘Make America Think Harder’) but primarily because Yang is very clearly the most data-driven out of those who are running for president right now. Who he is just so happens to line up almost perfectly with his campaign slogan. One must only go as far as to listen to the man speak to understand that it’s who he is. Not only was Mr. Yang the first candidate to have any policies on his website, he also has more than 100 substantive policies up on his website today: