All ten candidates at the Democratic Deabte for the United States Presidential elections.
“It is not left, it is not right, it is forward”. Andrew Yang drank from Scott Santens famous words, to finish off his contribution to the Democratic Debate to the United States Presidential elections in 2020. The political debate, held on June 27th 2019, featured all 10 Democratic Party candidates who qualified to be in the televised debate (more than 65000 donors). Yang’s Freedom Dividend was voiced, for the first time ever, on a US national debate stage, shortly described as a 1000 $/month for every adult citizen, unconditionally.
Although severely time restrained to hush in his ideas – he was only allowed 2 minutes and 50 seconds of speaking time, the lowest of all candidates present in the debate – Yang succeeded in the attempt to plant the seed of basic income among the American People. People are definitely interested in basic income, or at least the basic income as Andrew Yang conceives it, considering the spikes in views of his intervention clips, posted by NBC, which surpassed those of any other candidate. Soon after the debate, Google searches for “basic income” spiked to about 300% of the average search results for those terms.
In March, Yang’s candidacy had just surpassed the 65000-donor mark; now it has gone over 130000 donors, qualifying him to further debates, to be held in September and October this year. Also, his platform’s list of followers shows no signs of slowing down, having gained more than 100000 new followers, just for having participated in this debate. Whether or not Andrew Yang will become the next President of the United States, his candidacy has already been historical, by definitely sketching basic income on the public and political arena.
Yang’s contributions to the debate can be seen on this short video:
The Democratic Party in California is supporting Universal Basic Income (UBI). It is now public that people like Elon Musk have supported the initiative, mainly justified through job losses due to automation.
However, this of course leads to questions about the source of the influence that is supporting a basic income in the California Democratic Party, which has adopted on the 25th of February its official 2018 Platform.
In the Californian Democratic Party scene, UBI is mainstream, apparently, since it now features in the Platform, but not in the US as a whole. Since politicians with a Democratic label have to read and support the party policies, one may conclude that the UBI concept has gained traction in the Californian state, at least.
A growing cohort of young political activist leaders have been adopting UBI in their political campaigns. One such examples is 27-year-old Michael Tubbs, the present mayor of Stockton, California. He has promoted and launched a pilot project in Stockton municipality (funded by the Economic Security Project).
Region 5 (a congressional district) Director for the California Democratic Party, Rocky Fernandez, said that he has been talking about UBI for several years. Bob Wieckowski has also played an important leadership role in having basic income become concrete and part of the platform. The UBI platform proposal went through and “was passed,” in the convention by “thousands of party delegates”.
UBI has now a main statement in the Economic Justice section of the California Democratic Party platform. However, the same platform reinforces traditional Democratic values, which focus on jobs to further economic mobility for all Americans. The Party platform justifies the UBI in order to eliminate poverty, while simultaneously supporting efforts to establish government guaranteed jobs, that will “help people climb the economic ladder.” This could be interpreted as being willing to secure basic economic conditions for all people, while not trusting that these people will work if they get to be economically secure.
