2020 Hopeful Andrew Yang Proposes Giving Every American Adult $1000 a Month ‘Freedom Dividend’
Venture for America founder and 2020 Presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed giving every American adult — 18 years or older — a $1000 a month freedom dividend.
The dividend, he said, will help stimulate the economy.
Yang’s plan came in response to a question about automation on Sunday.
“Artificial intelligence has contributed to job automation leading to significant job losses in multiple sectors,” an audience member Emily Benson asked during a CNN Town Hall. “How do you propose regulating A.I. to ensure human employment and what do you propose in terms of reskilling programs to keep Americans competitive in the computer and machine age?”
Yang replied, “This is, in many ways, the key challenge we’re facing as a country… [Trump] won by the numbers because we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa. All of the swing states he needed to win and did win.”
He then said he has many friends in the tech sector and “they know what we did to the manufacturing jobs we’ll do to the retail jobs, the call center jobs and most disastrously the trucking jobs in the days to come. We need to think much bigger about how we will help Americans transition through this time.”
He then noted that data on retraining and education programs show they are “largely ineffective.”
“The effectiveness rate for manufacturing workers with federally funded retraining programs are between zero and 15%. So, we need to think bigger,” he said.
That is when he proposed giving all adult Americans $1000 a month, no work involved.
“A freedom dividend of $1,000 per month for every American adult starting at age 18. This would create two million new jobs in our economy,” Yang explained. “It would make children and families stronger and healthier and help tens of millions of Americans transition through what is the greatest economic and technological transformation in our country’s history.”
Watch above, via CNN
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