PORTSMOUTH — Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang believes a “trickle up” economy will benefit Americans far better than “trickle down” economics.

His principle of putting economic power into the hands of Americans is his proposed universal basic income, what he calls “the Freedom Dividend.”

Its premise is that every American adult starting at age 18 would be entitled to $1,000 per month from a value added tax on Amazon, Google, other tech giants and large manufacturers who are big engines in the overall economy but pay very little income tax.

“Amazon sucks up $20 billion of commerce out of your communities, and the stores close and you get zero,” Yang said to a Seacoast Media Group editorial board meeting Friday afternoon.

“So the way out of this is that we create a mechanism that gets the American people – you all – a slice of every Amazon transaction, every Google search, every Facebook ad,” he added. “It puts 1,000 bucks in your hands, makes your consumer economy and mainstream economy stronger, it grows your economy by over 15 percent and supports 20,000 new jobs in your communities.”

Automation of jobs fueled by tech company innovations is taking away American jobs, according to Yang, and ultimately harming individual productivity and earning power.

“It creates the trickle up economy that we need and it puts you in a position to gain from all the investments they’re making,” he said. “Don’t think that your malls are closing because of automation? Because it is. If you go to that Amazon fulfillment warehouse, you’ll see wall-to-wall robots, it’s not wall-to-wall anything else.”

The Freedom Dividend has been the backbone of a presidential candidacy Yang announced in November 2017, a year after Republican Donald Trump won the presidency and far sooner than the 22 others currently in the Democratic field. He argues its need on the stump and in his 2018 book, “The War on Normal People.”

Yang, 44, is a Taiwanese American who was born in New York, attended Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated from Brown University, then got a law degree at Columbia. He was a corporate lawyer, tech startup entrepreneur and philanthropist, creating in 2011 Venture for America, a fellowship program for recent college graduates who want to become startup leaders and entrepreneurs. It was in the promotion of that venture that he said he saw the United States for what it has become. “I was staggered by the disparities between regions,” he said.

“When I flew between St. Louis and San Francisco, or Michigan and Manhattan, I felt like I was traversing decades and dimensions and ways of life rather than just flying a few time zones, where the disparities were so vast that I didn't understand, and I was trying to help other people understand it,” Yang said. “And then Donald Trump won the election in 2016, which was to me a huge red flag that tens of millions of our citizens decided to take a bet on the narcissist reality TV star as our president.”

He is vying for voter interest and attention in a crowd of Democrats, garnering upwards of 3% of voter support in national polls. A Granite State Poll by the UNH Survey Center in April put him at 2% among state voters. Poll leaders in that survey were Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders at 30%, former Vice President Joe Biden at 18%, and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Peter Buttigieg at 15%.

Trump proved in the 2016 campaign cycle that political outliers can win the White House. Yang sees himself in a similar position.

“In many ways, I’m a mirror image of what happened with Trump and the Republicans the last time,” Yang said, noting the established Republican – Jeb Bush – was the early favorite and Trump was dismissed because he was “against Republican orthodoxy.” Yet, Trump resonated with voters.

“The Democratic Party is in a similar spot this time – 22 candidates and no one really has that much confidence in Democratic ideas and policies,” Yang said. “As the word gets out about my campaign, I can grow and grow and keep growing past any other Democratic candidates, because I'm already peeling off Trump supporters, libertarians, conservatives, independents and the politically disengaged. You have no idea how many times people have said: You were the first candidate I have ever given to.”

“I seem very dissimilar from the other candidates,” he added. “I sound different, I'm focused on different things, my solutions seem completely different. And that's going to give me like a very clear lane and a growth path that is actually a much higher ceiling than virtually any of the other candidates.”

Another element in how he wants Americans to think differently is with the gross domestic product, or GDP, which Yang called “a bad measurement of how the economy is doing” and a metric that “means less and less to most Americans.”

A better measurement of domestic productivity, he said, is his “American scorecard.”

“GDP is a nearly century old indicator that we made up during the Great Depression. It's very old, it's very out of date, and it's increasingly unrelated to how we are doing. So we're going to update it. And we're going to turn it into the American scorecard that includes health and life expectancy, mental health and freedom from substance abuse, to a portion of elderly who can retire in quality circumstances,” said Yang.

“You create a basket of these measurements, and then you use them as your new scorecard. And then instead of reporting on GDP every quarter, which means less and less than most Americans, we actually have a list of how we are actually doing.”