Advertisement WMUR interview: Democrat Andrew Yang calls for health testing of presidential candidates Entrepreneur also explains, defends ‘Freedom Dividend,’ value-added tax proposals Share Shares Copy Link Copy

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, concerned about the ages of the current president and some of those running against him for his party’s nomination, wants to have a health test for candidates performed by a government physician.Yang, a New York entrepreneur known for proposing a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 monthly for all Americans over the age of 18, told a group of Granite State voters Tuesday he supports 18-year term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices because he is concerned about the advanced ages of some of the justices.Yang spoke in the first of WMUR’s “Conversation with the Candidate” series of town hall-style discussions. The program will air 7 p.m. Thursday. In an interview following the hourlong taping, Yang, who is 44, sat down for an interview and told WMUR that he is also concerned about the advance ages of some of the announced and potential presidential candidates – such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, and former Vice President Joe Biden, 76.Yang said that President Donald Trump’s age – he is 72 – “is probably playing into his mental health.”A native of New York state and a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Yang is an attorney. He headed an education preparation company and in 2011, founded Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that has trained graduates and young professional people to work for startup firms in economically troubled cities.He has said that he decided to run for president because he understands that the new technologies have eliminated -- and will continue to eliminate -- millions of jobs and he believes that traditional politicians are not acting quickly or decisively enough make necessary wholesale adjustments.He said in the interview that Americans will be best served by a president who understands the threat to the U.S. economy, regardless of age. At the same time, he said, candidates for president must be physically up to the rigors of the campaign and the job.“Traditionally, one of the values of our democracy is evaluating people based upon their qualities,” Yang said. “If someone was of a particular age and the American people said that’s not what we want, then that would presumably be up to us to decide.”But, he said, “I do think that given the importance of the position, it would make sense to have some sort of transparency where if someone is past a certain age, then there should be some sort of physical or some sort of health report.“It should not just be done by some private doctor and then kept in hiding, but just to show the American people that if you are running for this position and your continued health might be an issue, then we can rest easy on that front.”Yang suggested that the testing would be conducted by Office of the Surgeon General “or some public official, who says, ‘I can verify that this person’s health is strong and that their mind is sharp.’”Yang said that while he is most concerned by elderly candidates, “It might be a good idea to have it for everyone who wants to run, so as not to be singling out people based on age. But it’s becoming more and more relevant now.“Donald Trump was oldest president to ever take office, and the brutal truth is that some elements of running for president actually end up dovetailing with or being hand in hand with some of the qualities that you might actually be concerned about as a people.”Physical and mental fitness aside, Yang said future presidents must have “a keen sense of what’s happening in our economy and our labor force, particularly where technology is concerned. It could be the case that someone past a certain age has that sense, but that to me is the important thing.“Our government has fallen decades behind in addressing the impact of technology on the American workforce, and we need to get with the times,” Yang said.“That’s one of the premises of my campaign, but that’s not necessarily an age thing,” Yang said. “There could be candidates past a certain age who have the same sense.”'Freedom Dividend,' Value-Added Tax Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” is a federal distribution of $1,000-a-month to every American over the age of 18. Yang has said that with automation rapidly costing American jobs, the universal basic income plan would “provide money to cover the basics for Americans while enabling us to look for a better job, start our own business, go back to school, take care of our loved ones or work towards our next opportunity.”Yang defended providing the dividend to even the wealthiest Americans.“If you were to have a cutoff, the dividend would not be universal, and it would also be seen as a transfer from rich to poor,” Yang said. “If you make it universal, it becomes a right of citizenship.”Yang would fund universal basic income through a value added tax, which is a consumption tax placed on a product when value is added at each stage from production to a point of sale. “The tax will end up falling on Jeff Bezos,” the CEO of Amazon, “and people who are the biggest winners in terms of consuming more resources in our society,” Yang said. “If Jeff Bezos ends up paying tens of millions of dollars into our society and then gets $1,000 a month, then it’s not something we should not be that concerned about.”“The value-added tax for a typical American family would be a very small amount.”He also said it would be far more difficult for large corporations to “game their way out of” a value-added tax as they are able to do to avoid traditional taxes, he said.Yang noted that Amazon and Netflix paid no federal income tax in 2018.“If you have a value added tax, then you end up getting a slice of every Amazon transaction, every Google search, every robot truck mile,” he said. “It’s one reason why every other industrialized economy has a value added tax except for us.”Yang explained that the value added tax would generate about $800 billion in new revenue annually, “and on top of that, you have all the economic growth from putting this money in Americans’ hands, which would generate about $400 billion in new revenue.” He said cost savings on incarceration, homelessness services and health care as a result of the dividend distributions would be about $200 billion annually.“And then value gains from having a stronger, healthier, better educated, more productive, entrepreneurial workforce would be another $200 million,” he said. The cost of the UBI is about $1.8 trillion, “but you get about half of that with the value-added tax and about half from economic growth,” Yang said.Yang said he became convinced the UBI was the right course for the nation after working for several years in large, economically troubled cities in the middle of the country -- such as Cleveland and Birmingham, Alabama -- “and I saw the disparities between those communities and New York and Silicon Valley. “I’m now convinced that the imbalances are so dramatic that there is no real way to restore a sense of balance, except for a dividend. There is no other way to get the resources to the northern rural areas of New Hampshire or the inner part of Detroit.”Yang said hiking taxes for the nation’s wealthiest people – such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 2 percent “ultra-millionaire tax” on those with assets of $50 million or more – “makes sense on some levels."“But I think it’s going to be problematic to administer and enforce," he said. "It’s difficult to ascertain in an audit the assets of many of these individuals, and there would be very, very strong incentives for people to under-report or hide assets or move them around.”“A value-added tax is much more effective because it is commensurate to the levels at which people enjoy and use resources in our society,” Yang said. “If I’m a billionaire and I buy a new yacht, I’m going to end up paying significantly into the value-added tax, which is more effective and easier to enforce than a wealth tax would be.”Yang said that he is a capitalist, but he called the move in his party toward democratic socialism “a very natural outgrowth of young people in this country not feeling well-served by current economy. There are excellent reasons why they feel that way.“If you feel that this economy is not working for human beings and families, then something like democratic socialism may sound very appealing. But the whole socialism-capitalism dichotomy is archaic and out of date, and we need to evolve to the next form of our economy, which will take elements of both.“We don’t’ need to be looking backwards into the last century for idea as to where to go.” Meanwhile, Yang said he is pleased with the status of his campaign even as he faces many more well-known established politicians for his party’s presidential nomination.He said his campaign has raised more than $400,000 from “everyday Americans” in the last two weeks and said he is registering on national polls.“As people find out about me and the campaign, you are just going to see us growing from here, and we’re going to peak at the right time,” he said.