From President Trump to Joe Biden, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, direct cash payments are having a moment of unique bipartisan support, and Andrew Yang has a compelling argument for taking credit for that.
Yang’s $1,000-per-month, get-money-to-people Democratic presidential primary campaign, which ended just before the coronavirus pandemic prompted an economic crisis, may have been unexpectedly perfectly-timed advocacy that forever changed direct payment politics — and the legacy of his campaign is living on in continued direct-payment advocacy from Humanity Forward, the nonprofit organization that sprung from his campaign.
After the House and Senate hastily passed a second coronavirus aid package just before Christmas, Trump said that he wanted Congress to bump up the $600 second-round payments to $2,000, the number that congressional Democrats were originally aiming for.
In a rejection of traditional conservative concerns about wealth redistribution and the high price tag of giving payments to people who still have jobs, and in defiance of congressional Republican leadership, 44 House Republicans voted in favor of a $2,000 direct payment. Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rubio also said they backed the $2,000 checks, though the proposal never came up for a vote in the Senate.
Those working on universal basic income issues see bipartisan support for direct payments as a major shift. Jim Pugh, co-director of the Universal Income Project, said that there is “no question that Andrew Yang’s campaign contributed” to the change.
Pugh said that prior to Yang’s campaign, the policy proposal of universal basic income was mostly heard in political circles. A universal basic income pilot program in Stockton, California, launched in 2018, gave some awareness to the issue, but “it definitely just didn’t have any sort of large popular awareness or support,” Pugh said.
Yang, who recently filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York City, was a little-known entrepreneur when he launched a long-shot Democratic presidential campaign in November 2017 built on a central idea: give every American adult a universal basic income of $1,000 per month.
Fueled by features on alternative platforms like the Joe Rogan podcast, the once-obscure candidate built a large following and found popularity not only among Democrats but also libertarians and some Republicans. In the last quarter of 2019, his campaign raised a stunning $16.5 million, surpassing established politicians such as Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who raised $11.4 million in the same period.
Yang ended his campaign on Feb. 3, 2020, the night of the Iowa caucuses, when news of the coronavirus pandemic outbreak in China was starting to penetrate the public consciousness. A month and a half later, much of daily life was shut down, and an economic crisis was looming.
Consensus quickly spread across both Democrats and Republicans in Washington that the fastest, easiest way to deliver aid to people facing economic distress was to send relief checks of up to $1,200 to every citizen who made less than $75,000 in 2019 — echoing of universal basic income principles that Yang championed, just a short period after he was thrust into the national spotlight.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed the Senate 98-0 and the House by unrecorded voice vote (despite an attempt from Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie to force a recorded vote on the matter), and Trump signed it into law on March 27. Checks and direct deposit payments of up to $1,200 started hitting bank accounts soon after.
Yang said in a statement after the CARES Act passed that he was “pleased to see the White House adopt our vision of putting money directly into the hands of hard-working Americans.”
It was not the first time that the U.S. government sent payments directly to Americans. In an effort to boost the economy in 2008, taxpayers got advance payments of a refundable tax credit of up to $1,200 for joint filters, $600 for individuals, and $300 per dependent. In 2009 amid the Great Recession, some recipients of programs like Social Security or veterans’ compensation got $250 payments.
But the amount and scale of the $1,200 was a milestone. And it prompted a push among some Democrats to provide monthly payments for the duration of the pandemic, building on Yang’s central thesis. In an April 2020 tweet about his proposed bill to deliver $2,000 checks every month, Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan tagged Yang.
The legacy of Yang’s campaign continues with Humanity Forward, a nonprofit advocacy organization started by Yang after the end of his campaign.
Yang’s candidacy “certainly brought a conversation forward” about direct payments, said Greg Nasif, press secretary for Humanity Forward. “This is very much a bipartisan issue.”
Building off Yang’s mission, the organization lobbied more than 60 members of Congress to advocate for an additional direct payment, as negotiations between congressional Republicans and Democrats and the White House stalled.
Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Republican Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia in early December introduced a standalone bill to provide direct payments of $1,000 per adult and $1,000 per dependent, and it got a bipartisan slate of cosponsors. Republican Sens. Rubio, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Steve Daines of Montana, and Mitt Romney of Utah previously introduced the measure in the Senate.
“Demonstrating with this standalone bill that there was bipartisan support for direct cash relief,” said Nasif, “was instrumental to getting to the final bill.”
It is not only Trump who is finding that direct cash payments make for good politics.
President-elect Biden used the issue as a motivating factor at a Monday rally in support of Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington, those $2,000 checks will go out the door,” he said.
Universal basic income advocates, for their part, are hoping that the popularity of direct payments in a time of crisis and newfound bipartisan support for that will
“The biggest barrier that we face to UBI is lack of familiarity that people have,” said Pugh of the Universal Income Project. “The more examples we have, the more people become familiar with what benefits come from putting out these almost-universal cash payments, the more we can have a real conversation about, ‘Okay, what does a national guaranteed income or universal basic income policy look like?’”
