Yang recently sat down with Bloomberg in a cramped conference room in San Francisco to talk about his ideas. Surrounded by stacks of his book The War on Normal People, the former tech entrepreneur quickly launched into his case that the tech sector bears responsibility for many of America’s problems.
Retail jobs vaporizing and shopping malls closing? That’s Amazon. Suicide and mental health issues on the rise? That’s Facebook. Journalism on the decline? Google’s ad network carries a bunch of responsibility for that.
And, he argues, there’s worse to come, as automation comes for clerical, call center, retail, food preparation and trucking jobs.
“It’s not immigrants causing these problems,” Yang said, in counterpoint to President Donald Trump. “It’s technology.”
And then he turns to his solution, which his campaign calls the Freedom Dividend but Yang informally describes as a “tech check.” To help pay for its estimated $4 billion cost, he wants to ditch corporate taxes on earnings and instead institute a value-added tax, or VAT, a tax on consumption. The VAT is used by a majority of developed counties, but is considered a non-starter in the U.S. for both parties: Republicans look at it as a tax hike, and Democrats believe it’s regressive because poor people’s consumption represents more of their income. Yang argues that if the tax were set at 10% (or about half the amount Europe charges) it would easily cover his $12,000 annual stipend for every American.
While Yang believes the tech sector has created a lot of problems, he also thinks it’s uniquely positioned to solve some.
Yang wants to allow voting by mobile phone using blockchain security. He favors net neutrality, letting consumers have a property right to their own data and increased investment in quantum computing and encryption technologies. He wants to bolster artificial intelligence to remain competitive with China and create a new agency to monitor the addictive nature of smartphones and social media.
And, more importantly, he doesn’t rail against the companies’ creators themselves. It’s a neat trick: He vilifies the effects of innovation while absolving the innovators, saying that’s a job for government regulators.
“This is a natural place where the government needs to come in and set parameters,” Yang told Bloomberg. “If you ask [tech companies] to self-regulate, they would literally be doing their shareholders a massive disservice if they were to scale back in any meaningful way.”
To help garner support for such policies, Yang wants to create an agency to educate elected officials on artificial intelligence, data privacy, online ad networks and other technology topics they often don’t understand but are expected to craft laws to regulate. Such misunderstanding, he suggests, is what led candidate Elizabeth Warren to propose a break up of big tech earlier this year.