navy's fight she's of naval operations. of naval vice chief operations starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span. later, look at the relations among the european union, the united states, and china, with foreign-policy scholars at the hudson institute live at noon eastern also here on c-span. 2020 democratic presidential candidate andrew yang held a rally at the lincoln memorial will stop you talked about the impact of automation on manufacturing jobs. his proposal to give americans a 1000 month or two income, and the effects of new tech elegy on the economy. this is 20 minutes.

it is incredible to be here with you. how many of you saw the cnn town hall last night? [applause] mr. yang: we get bigger every day and you are early adopters, you discover things early and yang is about to go mainstream. [applause] mr. yang: we are in the shadow of the washington monument, the lincoln memorial, i think near for the first time in eighth grade, how many of you had a trip to washington, d.c. in eighth grade? [applause] mr. yang: the first time you went overnight with your classmates and were nervous and trying to find roommates and prove you have friends.

you go to the lincoln memorial and it sinks in, you get it, you get the gravity of what the country went through and the man who helped bring us back together. i brought my family here to the lincoln memorial a couple of months ago for president's day. my kids are only six and three so i don't think they got it but -- they definitely did not get it. [laughter] mr. yang: but we get it. am i right? [applause] mr. yang: this country is going through major problems, not like civil war level problems, but serious problems nonetheless. i am not a career politician. i am an entrepreneur. i am a problem solver and i am here to solve the problem many

americans have been struggling with for the past two plus years and the problem is, why is donald trump our president? if you go to the mainstream media and say, how did donald trump win in 2016? what are the explanations do you get? why do they say he won? >> russia! mr. yang: what is number two? racism. sexism. facebook. fbi. these are the explanations we are getting, but i looked at the numbers. [cheers] mr. yang: the reason donald trump is the president -- look the numbers. i love the math signs and hats. make america think harder. right?

a straight line up, the adoption of industrial roadblocks in a and voting for donald trump. the reason he is our president today is we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in michigan, ohio, pennsylvania, wisconsin, missouri, iowa, all of the swing states he needed to win and did win. how many of you are from one of those states? you know what i'm talking about. my friends in silicon valley know full well what we did to the manufacturing workers we are now going to do to the regional workers, the call-center workers, the fast food workers, the truck drivers, and on and on through the economy. i don't know if that deserves applause. i think you are agreeing with me, which is beautiful. getting excited. thank you, brother. how many have noticed store closings around where you live and work? why are they closing?

amazon, that is right. amazon is like a vacuum cleaner sucking up $20 billion in business every year and stores can hang on for a while but now and mainerican malls street stores are going to close in the next four years. working as a retail cashier is the most common job in the united states. the average cashier is a 39-year-old woman making between $10 and $11 per hour and what will she do when her store closes? vote for andrew yang, that is a possibility. how many of you saw the recent google ai demo where they showed software that can handle customer service calls? did you see that? what do you think the timeframe is for ai outperforming a call center worker? what do you think? >> literally, tomorrow.

tomorrow is what he is yelling. i know when you call a company and get their company service bots, you do the same thing i do, you pound the keys until you get a human. i did the same thing. but we are only three years or so away from not being able to tell the difference between a bot and a human and in a few year a bot will pick up the phone and ask what they can do to help. you will be, that was delightful. we are three years away from that, but there are 2.5 million call-center workers in the united states making $14 per hour. and when ai can outperform one of them, they can outperform hundreds of thousands of them. i talk a lot about truckers. driving a truck is the most common job. 3.5 million truck drivers, average age is 49.

my friends in silicon valley are working on trucks that can drive themselves with the american reason, money. some people are screaming, yes, money. i like money, too. $168 billion to try to automate truck loving jobs. do you want to bet against $168 billion year in financial incentives? they tell me that they are five to 10 years away. they are testing robot trucks in the midwest right now. how do you think the truck drivers take it when they see robot truck drivers pass them? there are dozens of truck drivers that protested in indiana. they did a slow roll. they drove their truck slowly on a highway and drivers were like, what is going on?

why are these trucks going so slow? what were they protesting? they were protesting the digital monitoring of their driving time. they did not like being digitally monitored. there is a 14 hour restriction on driving a truck. after 14 hours, you have to turn the truck off for it gets mad at you. how are they going to react when competing against robot trucks that never need to stop? i have a feeling they will take it very poorly and only 13% of truckers are unionized today. we are talking about dramatic transformations in our economy and i came in washington, d.c., and 2017 after donald trump won and said what will we do about the fact we are in the midst of these fundamental transformation that has brought us donald trump? this was before i was running. so they could not say "vote yang" yet. but that is a beautiful message.

that is what you all are going to say. so i came to this town and said, what are we going to do? what do you think the responses i got in washington, d.c. were when i said that? shout them out. go ahead. >> [indiscernible] mr. yang: the responses i got from washington, d.c. where these, we cannot talk about that. boo! number two, we should study that further. [boos] mr. yang: and we must reeducate and retrain americans for the job of the future. that when you're like, that sounds pretty reasonable. again, i looked at the numbers. [applause] mr. yang: what do you think the success rate for federally funded retraining programs for a

manufacturing workers in the midwest? >> i'm going to guess not that high. mr. yang: it was 0% to 15%. it does not work. when i said, i did the math and we are terrible at retraining, they said to me, i guess we will get better at it. that is a washington, d.c., solution to a problem -- i guess we will get better. there was one meeting i had, and i have a staffer and colleague with me and i thank god for because if i told you this and he was not there to verify coming would be like, that did not happen. he said to me, andrew, you are in the wrong town. no one in this town will do anything about the problems you describe because this town is a town of followers, not leaders. [boos] mr. yang: and the only way to do something about it is a wave crashing down on our heads. that is the only way we will wake up.

>>, oh, it is coming. mr. yang: i looked at that and did not say this but i thought, challenge accepted. [applause] mr. yang: how many of you saw i am poling at 3% nationwide as of today? some people still have not heard of andrew yang. when they find out about me, oh, my gosh. the internet has me at fifth most likely to win the nomination. we know the internet is very, very smart. why is that? i am proposing, as you heard, the freedom dividend, $1000 per month for every american adult starting at age 18. [applause] mr. yang: that is right. the first time you heard of that you thought these three things, there is an asian man running for president who wants to give everybody $1000 per month. [applause]

mr. yang: and that is true. at first when you heard them you thought this literally sounds fantastic, too good to be true, almost sounds like a gimmick, but this idea has been with us since the founding of this country. thomas payne was ford. he called it the citizens dividend. martin luther king, his birthday we celebrate every year, he called it a guaranteed minimum income and championed it in 1967, the year before he was assassinated. milton friedman and economists signed a study that said this would be tremendous for the economy. milton friedman gets applause. it was so mainstream it passed the u.s. house of representatives twice in 1971 and 11 years later state adopted , one a dividend where everybody in the state gets between $1000 and $2000 per year, no questions

asked. what state is that? >> alaska. mr. yang: how do they find it? >> oil. mr. yang: what is the oil of the 21st century? >> technology. mr. yang: that's right. what they're doing in alaska, we can do for everyone around here with technology money. in alaska, they call it the oil check and they love it, we will call this the tech check and we are going to love it. [applause] mr. yang: think what would you do with $1000 a month? where would that money go? >> college! mr. yang: it would go to college for a lot of young people. we have to get the cost of college down. pay off the debt. credit card bills. it would stay in your local communities. you would end up spending it on food, bills, health care, the occasional night out, and a lot would circulate in the towns and

neighborhoods you live in. this is a trickle up economy for people, families, and communities. [applause] mr. yang: this is a freedom dividend that will make us stronger and healthier and mentally healthier. and if the democratic party will talk about empowering women, there are millions of women around the country that are in x close abusive or exploited relationship because they lack the economic freedom to walk away and $1000 a month would help that a great deal. am i right? [applause] mr. yang: we can talk about empowering women or do something about it, and i choose to do something about it. [applause] mr. yang: this is a freedom dividend. this is how we can build an economy that works for us and there is nothing stopping the majority of citizens in a democracy in declaring ourselves a dividend. nothing at all.

we need to wake up to that power that we have as americans. you will help us wake up the rest of the country and i thank you for that. [applause] mr. yang: we cannot stop there. we have to get health care off your back. you are all young and beautiful and in perfect health, a lot of you, you understand where health care now is a massive weight on millions of families and individuals where if you get sick or injured, you are more stressed out about navigating our crazy labyrinth of a health care system than getting healthy or getting well. that is messed up. that is immoral. we can change it. [applause] mr. yang: we can move towards a public option to make it so that if you get sick or injured in the richest and most advanced country in the world, you will not worry about your bills.

it sounds to good to be true but i have looked at the numbers. we spend 18% of our gdp to worse results than other countries and when people say, how will you pay for it? are you kidding me? i have run companies and we spent a ton of money on health insurance. when you are running a company, it is a disincentive to hire someone, it is is a disincentive to change jobs and a disincentive to start a business. how many have wanted to start a business but thought, what will i do about health care? how many of you have had that experience? this will unleash the dynamism of the mecca people to get health care off of our backs. the third thing, how many of you get excited about gdp when you wake up in the morning? [applause] mr. yang: i talk about my wife at home with their two young boys, one is artistic, what is -- one is autistic. what is your work value gdp

every year? zero. market value? n lot of other work being done in our country and so we are going to follow gdp off a cliff because self driving trucks will be great for gdp but they will be terrible for a lot of people. how do we shift to an economy that we would be excited about? we have to change the measurements. so instead of gdp, this phantom number we made up almost a hundred years ago the inventor , of gdp said that it is a terrible measurement for national well-being and we should never use it like that. number two he said we should include parenthood because it is so important. and number three, we should not include national defense spending because it adds no economic value. [applause] mr. yang: we ignore all of those things and worship gdp that he made up almost 100 years ago.

instead of gdp, what should we be focusing on? how about our own health and mental health? how about how clean our air and water are? how about average income and affordability? [applause] mr. yang: these are the problems of this era. gdp is at a record high but life expectancy has gotten shorter for the past three years. our life expectancy has gotten shorter because drug overdoses and suicides have overtaken vehicle deaths as cause of death in this country for the first time in our history. the last time our life expectancy declined three years in a row? the great flu pandemic of 1918, the spanish flu. that is the last time our life expectancy three years in a row and yet we celebrate gdp that means nothing while our people are dying earlier.

we have to shift the measurements to something that will reflect how we are doing, and as president, i will reflect on these numbers and present them every year at the state of the union with a powerpoint, i will be the first president to use powerpoint at the state of the union. [applause] mr. yang: that is right. you will get something out of the state of union instead of these bizarre theater performances every year. [applause] mr. yang: if people are trying to stand up and clap and not clap, like, what is this? it is so weird. >> numbers. mr. yang: numbers, that is right, i will show the numbers. this is how we can advance to the next stage of our economy. people are -- the number one in the presidential candidate to be by donald trump. we all know here that our campaign is already getting

former donald trump supporters and independents, republicans, libertarians, democrats, and progressives, we are going to build a coalition that will sweep the floor with donald trump. am i right? [applause] mr. yang: donald trump is our president today because he got a lot of the fundamental problems right. he did. when he was going around saying, these are not great, and the counter was, things that are great -- like that was not the , right response. there are real problems on the ground. he got that much right. unfortunately, his solutions are the opposite of what we need. his solutions are we need to turn the clock back, we have to build a wall, we have to try to -- [boos] mr. yang: and time only moves in one direction. i want to do the opposite of donald trump. i want to accelerate our economy

and society. i want to prepare us for the true challenges of the 21st century, and i am the right man for the job because the opposite of donald trump is an asian man who likes math. thank you all very much. thank you washington, d.c., i love you all. >> andrew yang! andrew yang! mr. yang: chant my name! chant my name! you are amazing. thank you. thank you! thank you. i will come and mix it up. thank you! yes! yes! thank you! thank you! good to see you again. thank you for being here. all right, i'm going to back off. [laughter] >> andrew yang! andrew yang! andrew yang! andrew yang! andrew yang!

andrew yang! andrew yang! ♪ >> c-span's road to the white

house continues tonight with new jersey senator cory booker. we join him live as he speaks at the democratic party black caucus town hall in des moines, iowa. watch live at a: 45 on c-span and you can follow online at freen.org or listen on our c-span radio app. announcer: c-span's washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up this morning a , discussion about the future of health care with julie of kaiser health news. then, a talk about the rising cost of insulating with someone from the diabetes patient advocacy coalition. be sure to watch live at 7:00 eastern this morning. join the discussion. >> want to do was three giant networks and a government

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