Andrew Yang forced a discussion at Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate on his proposal for a Universal Basic Income, a plan to send every adult a government check.
Yang, the former entrepreneur running on the platform of implementing a UBI, as it’s known, kicked off a debate about the idea among the candidates when he attacked rival candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan for a federal jobs program. Yang argued it was impractical and not what most voters truly wanted.
“I am for the spirit of a federal jobs guarantee, but you have to look at how it would actually materialize in practice. What are the jobs? Who manages you? What if you don’t like your job?” the former tech executive said, asserting that most Americans don’t want to work for the federal government. “Saying that that is the vision of the economy the 21st-century economy to me is not a vision that most Americans would embrace.”
He added that a federal jobs guarantee “does not take into account the work of people like my wife who is at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic.”
Yang’s proposal would give $1,000 cash monthly without any conditions, which he dubs a “freedom dividend.” He argues that the payment would be productive than federally supported jobs. “We know this in Ohio: If you rely up on the federal government to target its resources, you end up with failed retraining programs and jobs that no one wants,” he said.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker responded to Yang’s proposal by arguing that a higher minimum wage would be better. “We need to raise the minimum wage to $15,” he said. “That would put more money in people’s pockets than giving them $1,000 a month.”
Booker added that boosting unionization was also important because there “under attack.” He would purse that goal by promoting “sectoral bargaining,” which involves using collective bargaining to create uniform standards for entire industries. “Unions from the auto workers all the way to fast food workers can ensure that we improve workers’ conditions and make sure that every American has a living wage in this country,” he said.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued that the jobs problem was primarily the result of bad trade policy brought about by corporate influence. She proposed requiring 40% of a company’s board of directors be elected by the employees: “That will make a difference when a corporation decides, gee, we could save a nickel by moving a job to Mexico, when there are people on the board in the boardroom saying, no, do you know what that does to our company, do you know what that does to our community, to what it does to our workers?”
