It’s encouraging to see a smart young candidate for president talking about automation as a threat to the US economy and American jobs. The 2016 election was lacking any such discussion: The tech community was aware, but Washington lagged behind, as usual.

The formula is simple: When a machine become less expensive than a worker, then the human will go. And unlike the Great Depression, the jobs won’t come back.

Among the first jobs to go are the low-skilled sort, the employment that illegal border crossers count on getting in America. It’s likely that automation-caused unemployment would be higher without President Trump’s economic leadership.

Andrew Yang was interviewed yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning (the show made famous by Charles Kuralt and his nostalgic patriotism seen on the nation’s backroads).

Candidate Yang mentioned in his CBS interview about how automation has already had an electoral effect: “We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win, and did win.”

That job loss is an important point and a reminder that we are already on the big automation highway with no off-ramp.

One criticism of Yang is that he went rather quickly to his universal basic income plan without explaining the need more thoroughly, although it seems public concern about automation job loss is increasing.

Still, if the billions of poor on earth hear that America is handing out free money to everyone, more serious immigration enforcement is needed.

Hopefully the Democrat debate on Tuesday will give Yang more time to talk, which he has not gotten so far.

Andrew Yang on creating a “trickle-up” economy, CBS News, October 13, 2019