Why Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend Won’t Work
Although an admirable goal, the numbers don’t add up
Andrew Yang has some good ideas. In fact, many of his ideas outshine those of his democratic competitors.
Yang’s “Freedom Dividend,” a proposed $1,000 monthly payment to all American adults over the age of 18, is not one of those good ideas. In fact, a thorough examination of the plan reveals many issues with the candidate’s proposal.
The Freedom Dividend is not necessarily a new concept. The idea of implementing Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been pushed by members of the Democratic Party for decades. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana — and the inspiration for Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King’s Men — proposed a $2,000 UBI in 1934. And it was the British economist G.D.H. Cole who first coined the term “basic income” in 1953. Even in the late eighteenth-century, when America was still in her infancy, founding father Thomas Paine advocated for a yearly payment to every American adult.
The reasoning behind these proposals has changed over the years, but the basic tenets behind UBI have remained the same: technology, as it advances, pushes laborers away from the jobs they once held.
