Universal health care. Free college. A chicken in every pot. Campaign promises are nothing new.

But $1,000 per month for every adult citizen — that is causing some heads to turn. If you ask Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, it is the solution to the the country's biggest problem.

"To me, we are in the third inning of the greatest economic transformation in the history of the country," Yang told a crowd of Iowans amassed in mismatched chairs at a house in Iowa City earlier this week.

For Yang, the country is looking around and blaming the wrong people for the rise in economic insecurity and income disparity.

"It's not immigrants that are causing these problems," Yang said. "It's technology."

The twenty-first century's tech boom is advancing the economy quickly, Yang said, but because policies have prioritized an efficient economy, it has left many people behind. To explain, he pointed to a Fordian ideal:

“(A century ago), if I have a successful company, I need to hire a lot of people, pay them well and treat them well. I have to make sure they can buy my goods and services. I have to care about how things are going in my town," Yang said. "Now in this era, none of that is true. I can start a successful company, (and) not hire lots of people. If I do hire people, I can make them gig workers or contract workers to not give them healthcare. I don’t care if they can buy what I’m selling because I’m selling globally, and it doesn’t matter what’s going on in my backyard. All the things we used to take for granted are breaking down. And we are not adjusting. So we are stuck inside this socialism versus capitalism dichotomy that doesn’t really work for us."

To break from this dichotomy, Yang is advocating his $1,000-a-month idea.

The Freedom Dividend

As a starting point, Yang believes that the advances in artificial intelligence and automation will make jobs like truckers, retail workers and manufacturers obsolete.

By 2030, as many as 73 million workers in the U.S. alone will be displaced by automation, according to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute. To address the disruption caused by this massive exodus of jobs, Yang promotes what he calls the Freedom Dividend.

"I added freedom admittedly because it tests better across the country when you add freedom to it," Yang said, of the catchy name for what many economists dryly refer to as universal basic income, or UBI.

The Freedom Dividend is a form of UBI given to all adult citizens. He said there would be no limits on where or how it is spent. The money could go towards bills, food, healthcare costs, car repairs and even student loans. It is $1,000 in the user's pocket every 30 days.

While Iowa's population is growing, that growth isn't happening in all counties. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that between 2010 and 2017 two-thirds of Iowa's counties lost population: 71 counties lost residents and only 28 saw gains.

Yang thinks his Freedom Dividend could turn that around.

"You would suddenly have a lot of that money staying here in Iowa," Yang said. He said it would help Iowans live in place rather than having to leave for opportunities elsewhere.

But who's paying for it?

Yang filed to run back in November of 2017. He was courting Johnson County Democrats as early as the October 2018 Johnson County Democrats fundraiser and barbecue.

All this time, universal basic income has been on his mind, and for Johnson County voters, the question has been how Americans are going to pay for it.

Yang has become quick to answer this one.

"A VAT. Does anybody know what that is?" Yang asked.

A VAT or value added tax is a tax paid at the point of consumption. For example, when an Iowa City resident goes to buy a pie shake, the Hamburg Inn No. 2 would pay a tax on the transaction for offering a service. The ballpark figure for the VAT tax Yang has been proposing is between 7 and 8 percent.

At Sunday's house visit, an Iowa City resident asked whether that would be a regressive tax. The idea being, the business would pass that tax onto the consumer of the pie shake by increasing prices. Since that 4.99 pie shake is a bigger percentage of income for someone that makes $20,000 than someone that makes $50,000 per year, the tax would be regressive, demanding a greater percentage of the poorer person's income.

Yang said that he fully expects a price increase to result from a value added tax. But he argued that even if prices went up 7 or 8 percent with $12,000 extra in the bank, people will still be better off.

There has been research looking at what kind of economic expansion would result.

The Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank, reported that based on its modeling, a proposal like Yang's could result in a GDP expansion of 12.56 percent after eight years. The economic stimulus, however, would be mitigated after those eight years. In addition, when the model added the value added tax, it appeared to mitigate the impact on the economy.

Yang "eye-to-eye" with local AI pioneer

On the campaign trail Wednesday, Andrew Yang took IDx Technologies Inc. up on an invitation to look at in work in implementing AI in healthcare.

"We are inviting everybody out because we want to make sure that on a national level people understand and are anticipating the impact AI is going to have on healthcare," said Benjamin Clark, the president and COO of IDx.

Clark said he was familiar with Yang's Freedom Dividend pitch and said he was excited by a candidate looking at solutions to "macro-level" issues like AI and the impact on the economy.

"In a lot of way, I think he is way ahead of the curve in terms of thinking about these issues and raising questions about the consequences of what broad deployment of AI are going to be," Clark said.

IDx is working on an FDA approved, fully automated way of detecting diabetic retinopathy. The condition is a complication of diabetes that can lead to deterioration of sight. It is recommended that people with diabetes get tested yearly for sight deterioration so it can be caught and treated. Clark said that because testing requires patients to go to specialty doctors, many patients go un-diagnosed. Approximately 93 million people are estimated to have diabetic retinopathy.

“It's a requirement that every patient get tested annually for diabetic retinopathy if you have diabetes,” Clark said. “But only about 50 percent of the population adheres to that. If we were to hit 100 percent of that the capacity of eye care professionals isn't even there to meet that. We have a huge unmet need that we are trying to fill.”

Because of this gap in eye care professionals, Clark said he doesn’t picture this AI solution putting a lot of people out of the job.

“It makes this conversation a little easier,” Clark said. “Where it gets interesting is what that pathway looks like in other spaces where there may not be the same situation.”

After Yang’s tour, Clark said he was impressed.

“He understood the technology and the use case right out of the gate after a quick orientation,” Clark said. ‘And he understood its implications for health care more broadly almost instinctively. It’s always gratifying to have people understand the technology on that level.”