FULL CAPACITY: Presidential candidate Andrew Yang gets big crowd in NH

apparently I wasn't the only one it's so great to be here with you all apparently we've set a record for the season in terms of number of people at a political event in this library so I've been asking people raise your hand with how many presidential candidates you've seen this cycle so far so I'm the first it'd be like this if it this v7i go ahead make me anything Wow I see so a lot of one's a 990 but right now I just want to say you all are a little bit spoiled we're people in New Hampshire like I don't know about that yank I only met him once but the reason why presidential candidates are coming here is because you control the future of the country it's a beautiful thing and I know that someone like me I don't get compared to just the other candidates in the field I hate compared to candidates from the last cycles I'm standing in someone's living room they're like Barack Obama stood right there where you were I want to walk you through my path from graduating from Exeter and 92 to being with you running for president today you get the plan was not to run for president and I can prove that through my fashion choices so I graduated from Exeter I went to Brown University and when do that no one brought god the room went to law school anyone do that couple people oh yeah nice went to law school became an unhappy corporate attorney for five whole months birds so I left to start a business how do you all start in a business organization let's say so if you've started a business raise your hand you know how brutally difficult it is and how whenever anyone asks you how it's going what do you have to say it's great because you ever say oh it's terrible that no one was like oh so I kind of want to buy your stuff that I don't want like help you I was gonna tell my friends about your business but now I can't so I started this company and it did not work out that it's mini rise and maximum fall my parents still told people I was a lawyer by the bug though when I said who I want to try and get better at this even though it's really really hard so I worked for a technology company for a number of years and then I became the head of an education company that grew to become number one the United States and was bought by a public company in 2009 now 2009 was a rough time in the country it was the aftermath of the financial crisis you don't remember the financial crisis you believe it's already been like 10 11 years but man without a rough time in the country and I thought I had some insight as to why the economy had gone south it was because so many of my friends from exeter and brown and columbia had become Wall Street whiz kids and it helped crash the economy by coming up with these exotic financial instruments and derivatives and the rest of it so I said okay that's a train wreck don't want more of that what would we want our people to be doing ideally and so I thought well I've grown so much as an entrepreneur I want to create more entrepreneurs around the country and I had this joke but it's totally true that if you're a young person you're not sure what to do and you say I want to go to law school your parents will say that's a great idea it's easy to find law school and the government will give you a very helpful $100,000 little no questions asked if you say you want to start a business your parents will say that's a terrible idea it's hard to find and no one wants to give you $100,000 so there's no mystery why we have this oversupply of indebted unhappy law under supply of entrepreneurs in places like New Hampshire and Providence in New Orleans in Baltimore so I started an organization called venture for America I donated some money and I started calling rich friends and asked them do you love America the smart among them said what does it mean if I say yes to this question and so twelve people said I love America for ten thousands like I thought you did so we had a car out a couple hundred thousand grew and grew eventually helped create several thousand jobs around the country how many of you grew up here in New Hampshire how about Midwest Wow west coast and then northeast some places one thing Hampshire you thinking about majority so those of you have your hand up at that last question I'm like you I you know I grew up in upstate New York I went to high school here went to college and run Rhode Island I had never been to Birmingham New Orleans Cleveland Detroit and I was blown away by the disparities between st. Louis and San Francisco and Michigan and Manhattan if you make that flight you feel like you're traversing dimensions or decades or ways of life and not just a few time zones so I was learning all of this and then Donald Trump became our president in 2016 and if you're here today you probably do not welcome that development like honey I there are some people here I'm sure that voted for Donald Trump oh I took it as a giant red flag that our fellow citizens were so desperate that tens of millions of them decided to vote for a narcissist reality TV star as our president it's like that's a terrible terrible sign that's not gonna stop what you're doing particularly because in my shoes at that time I was literally getting medals and awards for being the guy that helped create several thousand jobs around the country and what I was trying to convey to people so you don't get it I feel like I'm pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole ripped in the bottom and then that water rushing out of the bathtub led to Donald Trump becoming our president if you turned on cable news and tried to figure out why Donald Trump won in 2016 what would your explanations be based upon the cable news broadcasts Russia racism Facebook the FBI Hillary Clinton some mixture of those things but the numbers tell a very distinct and different story the numbers say that the reason why Donald Trump is our president today is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Ohio Michigan Pennsylvania Wisconsin Missouri and Iowa all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win and did win New Hampshire lost these manufacturing jobs a bit earlier but some of you remember that and now what we did to the manufacturing jobs we're going to do to the retail jobs the call center jobs the fast-food jobs the truck driving jobs and on and on through the economy how many of you have noticed stores closing where you live here in New Hampshire and why are those stores closing Amazon Amazon's like a giant vacuum sucking up 20 billion dollars in business out of retail businesses and your communities how much did Amazon pay in taxes last year that's right so think about that math 20 billion out zero back 30% of your stores and malls close and the most common job here in New Hampshire and around the country is working as a retail clerk the average retail clerks a 39 year old woman making between nine and eleven dollars an hour so when her store closes what is her next opportunity going to be we're trying to get a job in the Amazon Fulfillment Center before they automate that - when you call a large company and you get the software on the other side of the line what do you do you dial zero zero zero or human human human is that smart right you like get the software out of my ear and get me a human immediately I do the exact same thing we all do it in two or three years the software is gonna sound like this hey Andrew how's it going what can I do to help you it's gonna be quick efficient delightful you might not even realize it's software you don't need artificial general intelligence to do that job you've seen a really good decision tree and a lot of products even changes the tone of voice that you can know if you're getting urinated they can start going down different decision trees what is that gonna mean for the two and a half million Americans who work at call centers for a living to make $14 an hour right now I spoke to a group of 70 CEOs in New York City I asked them how many of you are looking at replacing your back office clerical functions with artificial intelligence guess how many hands went up out of 70 all 70 that's right you could actually fire a CEO who didn't replace the back office workers because we know how our system works we know how the CEO has to just manage the bottom line and so if someone discovered that they did not get rid of the back office clerical workers when they have the ability to replace them with software then you would fire that seat you don't get a new one this is the greatest economic transformation in the history of the country what experts are calling the fourth Industrial Revolution we're in the third or fourth inning and it brought us Donald Trump it's just going to accelerate as artificial intelligence software machines get better and better driving the truck is the most common job in 29 states including this one my friends in California are working on trucks that can drive themselves why do they want to create self-driving trucks for the money a hundred sixty-eight billion dollars a year in cost savings if they can get rid of truck drivers I'll walk you through this because people tend to find this really interesting and it's also to me one of the most important developments in our country right now when I talk to the engineers in Silicon Valley who literally are some of my friends they tell me that they are 98% of the way to autonomous sharks now having a 2% gap is a major problem because you can't have semi-truck smashing into things at 2% be like oh that's too bad vehicles so the way they think they get the last 2% you'll remember the first time you watched TV on your phone and you were like bye I can do that now remember that so that was 3G we're in the process of rolling out 5g and the way they think thinking about the last 2% is they're gonna have so that the trucks are really bad at something called snow because what they do is they rely upon the road markings and the snow covers the road bargain under the cup here is not sure what to do so the way they can serve out that problem is that the truck is going to signal a tella operator sitting in a warehouse in Nevada who's then going to beam into the truck because the truck is equipped with tella operating software and connected via 5g so it can happen in real time so the tella operator beams into the truck and then can see out the front of the truck like it's a video game because the trucks have cameras in the front so they beam in they take control the truck and then that computer says I'm okay I'm confident again you can leave and then they beam back out what do you think the ratio is going to be between these tella operators in Las Vegas and the three and a half million Americans who drive a truck for living right now 10% 5% something that organized it's probably more likely like 2% honestly what is that going to mean for not just a three and a half million truckers but the 7 million Americans who work at truckstops motels and diners that rely upon the truckers getting out having a meal how many of y'all know a truck driver so if you know a truck driver you know that they have to get out of the truck after 14 hours the truck will actually seize up and start beeping and say get out you know go to sleep get a meal a dozen truck drivers protested a few months ago in the Midwest they did something called a slow roll he started driving a truck slowly on the highway so everyone behind them had to drive slowly - that was peuta it was like why we all going so slow what were they protesting they were protesting the digital monitoring of their driving time how do you think they're gonna react when it's a robot truck that doesn't stop and it's a livelihood only 13% of truckers are unionized 87% are mom-and-pop businesses they took out massive loans to buy a few trucks they hired some drivers imagine if it was your life savings that's taken there's a robot truck that never needs to stop when I dug into what happened to the manufacturing workers I went to the folks in Washington DC my first move was not to run for president because I am NOT insane my first move was to go to DC and say guys America is going through the greatest economic transformation in our history we're scapegoating immigrants for something ever going to have nothing to do with America does not understand what are we going to do about this set of problems I had my math my powerpoint DAC you like my figures the rest of it and what do you think they said to me in Washington when I came to them with this case and this question yeah number one we cannot talk about that number two we should study that further and number three probably the most common was we must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future that sounds pretty responsible you'd be like no good menus leave what what I said was look I checked the numbers you all want to guess how affected the government funded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs zero to 15 percent there were largely a dud and so then when I said that to the folks in DC you know they said to me I guess we'll get better at it that's what passes for policy I studied economics at Brown haven't you all say economics people always did what did our macro economics textbooks say would happen to the four million manufacturing workers who lost their jobs invisible hand that's right they'd get retrained rescaled move for new jobs that are higher productivity and all would be well remember that macroeconomics get a B in that class so when you dig into the data as to what happened to the manufacturing workers in the Midwest in the south you find that the invisible hand was not there for that is that instead half of them left the workforce and never worked again I know of that group have filed for disability and then you saw surges and suicides and drug overdoses at unprecedented levels in those communities to the point that American life expectancy has declined for the last three years I don't want to know the last time American life expectancy decline three years in a row the Spanish flu of 1918 a hundred years ago global pandemic killed millions that's the last time we're back in that territory now because suicides and drug overdoses of both overtaking vehicle deaths as leading cause of death and it's very much lined up because if you look at it geographically the concentration is highest in areas that had the highest concentration of lost manufacturing jobs what happened to the manufacturing workers will happen to the truck drivers actually at a higher degree manufacturing workers are approximately 70 percent male range of different experience levels and backgrounds truck drivers are 94 percent male average age 49 average education high school or one year of college tens of thousands of them are ex-military it's a relatively uniform group I was at a truck stop recently and I said I say to you honestly if you said I'm here to retrain you they'd be more likely to punch you in the face then sign up that's true think of you you know give you better trucks out ladies you're talking back oh I'm gonna have to be like it I'm the government we trainers so I came out of Washington with this feeling like you all I have a feeling are also let's say skeptical that Washington's up to some of these challenges and there was a person in Washington who sent me here to you all he said Andrew you're in the wrong town no one here will do anything about these challenges because this is not a town of leaders this is the town of followers the direct quote I was like hit this conference room very fancy conference room he said this to me and then he said the only way we would do anything about it here in DC is if you create a wave and other parts of the country we're gonna crashing down on our heads and I said challenge accepted I'll see you after I come back with a wave and that's why I'm here with you all today so I'm here with you today as one of nine candidates to make the fall debate stage so Thank You yang guy in 5th place according to the latest Fox poll and I'm here with you today as one of only two candidates in the race that 10% or more of Donald Trump voters that they would support yeah that means if I'm your nominee we're going to win the whole thing the question is what are we gonna take to the rest of the country this room how many of us are there I should ask someone officially what's the attendance count like 250 all right we can't say it what is the actual legal capacity of the server okay so they're exactly 160 this room you don't know how powerful this room is do you know how many Californians each new HAMP's New Hampshire voters worth a thousand that's right so this is the equivalent equivalent of a hundred sixty three thousand California for a football stadium tour the Californians in this room this is the kind of room you can launch a revolution from it's so much fun to be here New Hampshire is one of the only places in the country where a democracy actually functions where the will of the people is important where you can change the course of history most of the rest of the country looked at you all enviously because where they are they think they just have these giant pipes clogged with money and their votes don't matter they're right their votes don't matter it's telling like it is your votes matter that's why I'm here that's why the candidates are gonna keep coming so why what are we going to take to the rest of the country if you've heard anything about me remember this is like the first time the first time you heard anything about me with something like this there's an Asian man running for president wants to give everyone his house not as much and the first time you heard that you were like haha that's a gimmick that's a joke never happened too good to be true like you know dismissed it but this is a deeply American idea it's been with us since our founding Thomas Paine championed it in the earliest days of the country called it the citizens dividend Martin Luther King fought for it in the 60s called it the guaranteed minimum income in his book cancer community and it is what he was fighting for in the day he was assassinated in 1968 Milton Friedman and a thousand economists endorsed it in the 60s and 70s it was so mainstream that it passed the US House of Representatives twice in 1971 under Richard Nixon and 11 years later one state actually passed a dividend where now everyone in that state gets between one and two thousand dollars a year no questions asked and what state is that and how do they pay for it and what is the oil of the 21st century technology data AI a study just came out that said that data is now more valuable than oil they called it the oil check and they loved it we're gonna call this the tech check and all of America is gonna love it and if you ask how can we possibly afford $1,000 a month again Amazon trillion-dollar tech company paid zero in taxes less than everyone in this room of course you're gonna have a hard time affording things if your biggest winners are paying zero in taxes and that's not an anomaly they regularly pay zero in taxes it's unusual that they do pay taxes think about that they're just doing their job they have very good accountants they go into Jeff's office at the end of the year and say hey Jeff great news zero taxes again and then what does Jeff do Jeff goes that's the news I'd like to hear and then he goes into his vault in the back takes giant sacks of money the account accounts like good job this this plays itself out in Seattle every year if we designed a system that allows the showing our tech company Pitt to pay zero taxes that's on us so what we do have to do is we have to give the American people a tiny sliver of every Amazon sale every Google search every Facebook ad every robot truck mile and this amount of value is so immense that we can generate hundreds of billions of new revenue very very quickly particularly because when the money comes into your hands how are you going to spend a thousand dollars a month in real life rent tuition student loans chairs sports activities I like it how much of the money would stay right here in your communities most of it not all of it something flowed up to the cloud again but most of it would be right here it would go to daycare and car repairs and Little League signups the keys all night out it would blow through your communities it would create more than 10,000 jobs right here in New Hampshire it would also create a path forward for rural areas that right now we're getting depleted by the modern economy and having Main Street stores closed this is the trickle up economy from people families and communities up and unlike the trickle-down nonsense that everyone knows doesn't work this would work this is the vision we can take to the rest that country will catch on like wildfire oh how many of you are excited about GDP when you woke up this morning yes may it go up today maybe I'll make a big contribution and I like to talk about the work my wife does I was just texting around the way in here my wife is at home with our two young boys one of whom has autism what does her work calculated at in GDP what does the market value her work out and we know that's nonsense we know the work she's doing is among the most challenging and vital work being done anywhere I was home with my kids for a couple of days and you alright said at the end of two days get me back on the presidential trail I love my kids obviously but like I know how hard my wife is working every single day so if GDP is a highly imperfect measurement of the value we're generating in our communities what would actually be a better measurement if something got better like what would actually make you excited mental help the happiness and freedom from substance abuse right health and life expectancy that's right if you said you were getting healthier and living longer that's a clean win that everyone would be really pumped about wages and affordability clean air and clean water affordable medication and healthcare jobs that we enjoy good jobs instead of these punishing temp gig and contractor jobs that are now ninety-four percent of the new jobs created in our economy yeah fordable housing social equality renewable energy believe it or not we have numbers for all of these things we're following GDP off a cliff and even the adventure of GDP said a hundred years ago he said this is a terrible measurement for national well-being we should never use that and here we are a hundred years later being like GDP GDP self-driving cars and trucks will be tremendous for GDP they're gonna be terrible for a lot of Americans and again you can see it's so clearly a record high GDP also record high anxiety depression stress drug overdoses suicides life expectancy declining oh thank you thank you sir so it how many of you run a business again raise your hand imagine if you were running a business you are the wrong measurements like how's that business gonna do overtime terribly that's where we are right now a reporter from NBC just said something to me that made me very happy for the sports fans here he said you're like the Moneyball of economics because what are the three big measurements that we get in the press GDP headline unemployment and stock market prices they're all very very bad measurements GDP we just went through headline unemployment doesn't include people dropping out of the workforce doesn't include people doing multiple jobs doesn't include people who are underemployed relative to their education level all of those numbers are hugely problematic the labor force participation right now in the United States and sixty-three percent close to a multi-decade low in the same levels as Costa Rica in El Salvador if you want international comparables that is not normal stuff and if you dig into the numbers you find that a lot of it is because unskilled men are getting pushed out of the workforce which is completely consistent with what you'd expect if you were automating away a large segment of those jobs now does that come up when you say and headline unemployment is low of course not the stat is actually intentionally designed to discard a lot of the most important data and stock market prices the bottom 80% of Americans own 8% of stock market wealth the bottom 50% own essentially zero so if you look at stock market prices your cheerleading for the economic fortunes to the top 20% of Americans so these are the three measurements we see when we turn on the news every single night and none of them works as your president it's going to be my joy to go down to the street to the Bureau of Economic Analysis and say hey guys GDP a hundred years old kind of at a date let's update it for happiness environmental quality how our kids are doing affordability turn it into the American score card and I will present it to you all every year at the State of the Union in a PowerPoint deck so this is the vision we can take to the rest of the country in 2020 of the economy that's centered around our own well-being of seeing ourselves as the owners and shareholders of this country instead of being inputs into this giant capital efficiency machine because if we let the market determine our value we're gonna lose on an historic catastrophic scale it's gonna zero out the truck drivers but it's also to zero out the accountants it's gonna zero out the radiologists I was an unhappy lawyer just long enough to know that you can automate that job I mean it's a joke but contracts much much faster and more error-free than the smartest lawyer so we need to evolve in terms of the way we see our role in this society when you talk about how this was mainstream political wisdom in the 70s and then all of a sudden now it takes like the far-out Asian futurist man to like bring it back what happened intervening 50 years it goes from Martin Luther King mainstream political wisdom like this close to being passed in the wake of Social Security and Medicare and then 50 years later it's like oh that's impossible they really reflect on what the heck must have changed in that timeframe I think had a lot to do with it I agree but I talked to my wife about this and she says that she believes we've been collectively brainwashed you have zero economic value than you have zero value and that if you're a trucker somehow it makes sense to try and turn you into a coder one really that makes absolutely no sense if you reflect on that for a moment you like what I think that we could do that or that we should do that or that person wants that it's because if the person doesn't have economic value then they have no value but again that model is gonna break down on us it's breaking down on us right now it gave us Donald Trump it's turning us against each other it's making our fellow citizens subject to terrible terrible ideas and terrible terrible leadership this is what we have to undo this is the root set of causes this is the disease Donald Trump is the symptom we have to cure the disease this is the vision we have to take to the rest of the country as fast as possible Oh Donald Trump's our president today and I think about this a lot Donald Trump at 2015 what was this fundamental message things are going bad we're gonna make America great again what did Hillary say in response America is already great and that message did not work Donald Trump's our president today in large part because he got some of the problems right but its solutions are the opposite of what we need his solutions where we're gonna build a wall we're gonna turn the clock back we're gonna bring the oil jobs back we have to do the opposite of all that we have to turn the clock forward we have to accelerate our economy and society as fast as possible we have to evolve in the way we see work and value and I am the ideal candidate for that job because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math I'm going to do it we trust me to self moderate most of the time so I'm this point to someone yes sir Greg t-shirt hey there's a mountain you listen I my mom is forever so does noise okay so I know like everywhere on the internet everyone's all about you know like the freedom dividend and I am gonna ask you a question about it just cuz you know it's just it's the thing with your camp and even though I haven't followed you for about a year thank you so my question is this in theory if I'm gonna have twelve thousand dollars more a year what's gonna stop like scummy landlords health care all these people from just charging me more money so I in theory will not have any more money to spend so I've dug into the sources of inflation in our economy job remember voting for the four trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street remember that of course not and so we bailed out the banks to for twenty dollars but one thing that happened was that there was not massive inflation even though we printed four trillion for the bank's inflation right now is not being driven by money supply it's being driven in three core areas and unfortunately they're the areas you just identified what's your name right great so what are the three areas of inflation that are making us all miserable housing education health care if you look at your other costs they're more or less constant like clothing food entertainment electronics cars all of either stayed that roughly the same price or they've gotten better the same price but housing education and health care have not and each of those has its own set of obstacles so housing you have these landlords you also have NIMBYism where it's hard to build affordable housing in particular areas and it's also the case that you feel like you have to live in certain areas to be able to access employment and it makes it so you're constrained in where you live education and many of you look quite young so you're living this and I'm sorry but why does college got two and a half times more expensive when it hasn't gotten two and a half times better yeah the administrative cost has gone up and up and up and young people feel they have no choice but to pay the cost or families well I guess this is the way it is now in America and then you take out these crazy loans that the government makes available to you and then you wind up loading people up with debt health care you have private insurers device manufacturers drug companies all profiteering off the American people and then they just raise the prices every year I ran a business health insurance prices only go one direction you ever have a health insurance company notify you Medicare prices going down the price down and I love Obamacare yeah that was it Obama ambassador two very large hands so if we got this money in your hands it would not cause inflation all these verticals where there's a lot of competition it would help you manage inflation in health care education and housing and what we have separate plans to try and control the cost of education health care housing those are the three problem areas now it's easier for a landlord to stick it to you if you don't have this portable income that goes with you everywhere you go so let's say you lived in a rental right now and then the your lease is up within your landlord shows up and there's like hey Greg like we just like freakin jacked up your prices because president yang and the freedom dividend I know you got the money and then you look around you'd be like well like I don't enjoy this like I'm cost sensitive I'm looking for a bargain so then you get together with a couple other people and you say with among the three of us we're getting three thousand a month how about I stick it to this landlord I walk out and then maybe we like buy some fixer-upper together or like it's portable we can move around you're actually much harder to exploit if you have portable income that goes with you anywhere and you spent and you can pull it this could give rise to many different communal living options for many many Americans because you get six friends together all of a sudden holy crap it's like what six thousand month you guys you could like look around the whole town be like what are we gonna do guys so so it's a way to help balance the negotiating power the freedom dividend actually was originated by a guy named Andy Stern who used to run the biggest labor union in the country and what he said was like this is going to make us more exploitation proof it makes us much much harder to exploit because this dividends coming into our hands and you know like it increased our bargaining power miss so I was endorsed just this past week by Elon Musk very exciting yeah and I've also been endorsed by uh Jack Dorsey Alexis Ohanian who Serena Williams is husband read it read it read it read it read in history or stuck waiting at the door so they're positive technologists who believe that we're automating away these jobs and want to do something about it so if you're going to save one hundred sixty two billion dollars on the truckers for example I'm proposing we set up a trucker transition fund that if you're going to save one hundred sixty eight billion you can put aside tens of billions that helps truckers find new opportunities the tough truth is that if you set a retraining program which is the customary government approach it would work for approximately 15 to 20 percent of the trucker's and the other 80 percent on a different shape so as president let's imagine you're a trucker right now it's 2021 and you're like wow president yang is in good because the only seems to understand what's going on in my industry you get $1,000 a year for five years because your jobs gonna be there for five years and then there's a trucker transitions are who's like okay now your jobs gone but at this point you have 50,000 in savings we have this massive amount of resources that we're going to deploy to help you find a new path forward and then that trucker has at least the beginnings of a foundation to take a step forward there is no magic bullet but the great thing about it is imagine your towns in New Hampshire with another $12,000 a year and everyone's Hannah does that towns have more vibrant nonprofits volunteer opportunities religious organizations political activities there are many many more things for people to get involved in at every level so we can create different access points for people at every experience level every type of occupation if there's no magic fix but this is the best path forward to build an economy actually give people a chance to find their next step yes right side of the aisle what do you see to them so the freedom dividend would be for US citizens only so it is a very very powerful incentive to try and become a citizen I am for path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants we have over 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country it's impossible to deport that number of people you would collapse regional economies separate families the whole thing's a non-starter it's irresponsible actually to present a fantasy that you can somehow deport that many people right now there are problems because you don't know who anyone is they hit your institution thing into car accidents they go to hospitals that right now is a very problematic approach and the Republicans under Marco Rubio and others at one point championed a path to citizenship this was historically bipartisan it's just the Republicans have gone in another direction so I'm not someone who thinks that we need to we need to enforce the southern border we need to put proper resources in place and when during the first debate I raised my hand to say hey this healthcare program should apply to undocumented immigrants that doesn't mean it's cost-free like you can buy into it it's not that if you cross the border then all of a sudden you get access to healthcare is that there's a healthcare system that you can buy into and there are rates available for undocumented immigrants if they are able to do so I'm the son of immigrants myself you probably noticed so I'm very Pro immigrant generally and for people who are here studying abroad we should be trying to keep them here instead of sending them home to compete against us that's not that I can't have my kids competing against us yes miss so the question is about student loan debt which I agree has reached crisis proportions in this venture we're up to 1.5 trillion in student loan debt up from and so you guys know these are big numbers you might know but it was less than a hundred billion in 1999 now it's 1.5 trillion 20 years later that's a over a 15 fold increase like that staggering this really does echo the subprime mortgage bubble like we just wrapped up the student loan debt to epic levels the default rate is going up the average indebtedness now is around 30,000 or so things 37 right 35 thank you 35,000 now the tough part is that we've been over prescribing college to our young people we've been saying them college college college and if you don't go to college then you don't have a path forward only 6% of American high school students are a technical vocational or apprenticeship program in Germany that's 59% think about that Gulf and a lot of the technical and apprenticeship jobs are actually the hardest to automate can you imagine what it would take to make a robot plumber think about that there's gonna be a human plumber for a long time and then he's gonna tell us that he did something that was very expensive and they'll be like all right so so number one is we have to emphasize that there are different paths for that do not involve a college education number two we have to work with the colleges to get their part their cost down and the way I would approach that is to say look your administrator to student ratio has more than doubled over the last number of years while your price is double so guess what we're gonna tie your government grants and your taxes them status and your federal money to your administrator to student ratio you have to get it down over time and the schools are going to scream bloody murder over that but they're gonna find that those administrators have very little impact on the student experience and most students are not interacting with many of these administrators on a daily basis and then and then the third thing is I would forgive a significant proportion of the outstanding student loan debt because there's 1.5 trillion we have a stark choice to make the choices are we going to prioritize financial institutions and say to our young people you need to live in your parents basement you need to pay to pay off these loans four years not or do we want them to move out start businesses start families move society forward that's a very easy choice with the financial crisis we chose the banks this time we need to choose our people [Applause] geographically yes oh thanks for your support here are the top five occupations of donor to the yin-yang software engineers number one number two is driver number three is teacher number four is warehouse fulfillment center and number five is retail clerk so these are the people that are closest to the action when I talk to software engineers they're like oh yeah it's real because they know what's going on I am for a two-state solution it's to be the best path forward in terms of the stance of the US we just sort of I need to be the heavy to more questions and then no there's a lot of selfies up there we know the my biggest concern the first thing I do is appoint a head of an EPA that actually believes the mission the EPA about climate change globally and Pebble Mine specifically how many of you saw the the last debate where so I stake out the new third position on climate change hope you remember so position number one is we need to fight climate change this is number two is climate change is a hoax and then now the new and regaining position which is it's even worse than you think and unfortunately it is even worse than we think a study just came out from the UN last week that said we're gonna be fine if 90 percent of the world's population goes vegetarian immediately sunny just came out of Greenland that said the ice pack is melting at the rate projected in 2050 today so the numbers are painting a very very clear and disastrous picture on climate change we are now past the point where if we curb emissions we're gonna forestall climate change the United States of America is only 15 percent of global emissions and let me tell you some of the things that are going on in the other 85% so China is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy and then they're taking their coal dirty coal-fired dirty plans and then giving them to Africa they go to Africa and say hey we've got great news for you we got a power plant for you it burns coal and then Africa's like sign us up because if you're a developing country you just want the cheapest energy source that anyone's going to present to you does it matter what it's doing the environment so how would the u.s. then overcome those said those incentives in a place like Africa we would have to go in with clean energy that somehow cheaper more cost-efficient and a better deal for those societies than the coal plants that they're getting so not only do we need to curb our own emissions we need to go to the rest of the world the developing world get their emissions down I mean this is going to be an incredibly huge challenge in my view we need to also start mitigating the worst effects of climate change that we're seeing around this every day July was the hottest month in human history so thinking climate change is now let you know in the future it's now you were seeing the floods you're seeing the Hurricanes we need to start trying to make our society stronger create jobs create a more renewable sustainable infrastructure and even do more dramatic things like reforest tracts of land because the trees are going to help capture carbon and reforest the ocean no hear me out on this you have to have the marine permaculture arrays of kelp that we essentially seed in oceans to try and revive some of the marine life because the Atlantic Ocean is losing 4 to 8 percent of its life every year now I don't mean the stats are terrible as soon as you dig into the science you're like wow it's getting really really bad so we're past the point we're doing lesson two bad is going to save us we have to start proactively doing good o many questions now so in some place I have a soft spot for math hats yes what does that stand for that's right [Applause] I feel very strongly about this because I've seen the brain drain on both sides now and if you're a young person the temptation is to say I have to go to Boston or wherever in order accents kind of opportunities that want and a lot of that is because of the polarization in our economy right now where we're in this winner-take-all economy that certain markets are winning at very very high levels and then it's emptying out rural areas it's emptying out places around the country that can't compete with the bosses of the world the freedom dividend is like the great rebalance er or the economy because all of a sudden if you're a town of 10,000 people in New Hampshire it's pretty small town you're gonna get another 10 million a month that's going to be sustainable it's going to make it so that if you're a young person in that town and you want to do something you actually will have a much better chance finding an opportunity that you might enjoy or arts creativity starting a business culture Volunteers of all those things get supercharged in an economy where people have that level of economic resources this to me I spent seven years doing this work so I'm very passionate about it and I got clapped on the back I got trophies I got awards at a movie made about my organization and I was like none of this is gonna work because I see how dramatic the dynamics are so in the only way we're gonna rebalance the economy so young people don't feel like that belief sure is through something like the freedom dividend and that's the magic of being here in New Hampshire if I was anywhere else in the country we could have this conversation this meeting this gathering and then walk out into the night and say well well that was interesting but there's not much we can do in this room we can do it there's nothing stopping the majority of citizens in a democracy from voting ourselves a dividend nothing at all they did in Alaska which is a deep red conservative state been proven for 40 years we can do in the rest of the country because in my opinion you should not have to leave your town or your state to have a good life in the United States of America question sir so I'm a recent high school grad and I'm curious about your position on standardized testing because I think it's pretty awful however many years I've been into kids and I feel I've seen a lot of people that might not be great test takers you think that they're dumb when they're really really really not give me a hug man I feel agree more take it from someone who's really good at filling in our bubble cards those tests do not measure anything except the ability to fill out bubble cards and right now we are punishing so many of our young people they're showing up and they're saying like Oh like it's me like you know I'm not meant for this other dots like it's such nonsense the SAT we came up with it during World War two as a way to keep keep smart kids from going to the front line think about that we designed that being like oh we're gonna keep you from the front lines and then somehow that test became the determinant of human value in high schools around the country what the one of the things I say it's like somehow every year became war time it makes no sense we're preparing our young people for an economy that really needs to become more human quickly and the SAT and I things are like funneling people I've been to the top of the educational food chain and I know that the top of the educational food chain actually makes us much less human you know what I mean like if you think about the people that we're rewarding at the highest levels economically they're the people I can act the least human corporate lawyers management consultants hedge fund managers it's like the people who must become instruments then we say that's worth a ton and that's what our educational system is driving people towards that's the opposite

Channel: FOX 10 Phoenix

Views: 467,133

Rating: 4.7878976 out of 5

Keywords: Andrew Yang, New Hampshire, presidential candidate, 2020, white house, Yang, Plaistow Public Library

Id: E7DP_Q8eDt4

Length: 50min 9sec (3009 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mindlessLemming]

It would be wonderful if this lively conversation was about aquatic permaculture or assessing the viability of what he proposed. Unfortunately it's another disappointing US politics shit fight, complete with invoking "Nazis" in the discussion. That discussion belongs elsewhere, thank you.

[u/SixBeanCelebes]

I'm not American, but I work in the political realm in another country. I therefore have been at least watching the American process.

A lot of the current field will be filtered out very shortly by the process. But one of the benefits of a large pool of candidates is they're trying to differentiate themselves and one way of doing so is to raise issues and perspectives which the mainstream candidates shy away from. Yang's advocacy of the UBI is an example of this. UBI's got its supporters (I'm curious to know if it'll achieve what it's meant to, but I think the evidence is weak so far) but fringe ideas should, in a democracy, at least get an airing to see if they stand up.

It's not all that surprising that Yang would be suggesting permaculture-type solutions to several of the issues faced by the US, and other westernised societies. But I think it's probably the first time the P word has been uttered by an actual candidate within an actual major party.

[u/Metasophocles]

Isnt stopping the cutting down of trees/forest and planting a lot more the simplest, most effective climate change solution? Trees are this awesome terra forming technology people seem to forget about.

[u/jeffyshoo]

Just donated. Love everything he has had to say regarding climate, agriculture, etc

[u/entheox]

Not sure how many of you here follow US politics and the presidential campaign, but I've been closely following Andrew Yang and found it interesting that he dropped the words 'aquatic permaculture' in his answer to a question about climate change. I was initially attracted to his campaign after hearing about his proposal for a Freedom Dividend/Universal Basic Income of $1000/mo for every US resident over the age of 18, unconditionally. But the more I listened to him, the more I learned that the FD/UBI is basically just the foundation from which he plans to build a trickle-up, human-centered economy that promotes a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.

If you'd like to learn more about him, I can share some good places to start :D

Anyway, what are your thoughts on Yang?

[u/Rihzopus]

I am somewhat familiar with permaculture, but I have never heard of large scale aquatic permaculture. Does anyone have a link?

[u/njappboy]

America isn't democratic. Its an oligarchy.