where every American adult gets $1,000 a month starting

at age 18 until the day they die.

So every American adult gets $1,000.

And when you get it, you can do whatever you want.

$12,000 a year and it continues until you expire.

Well first, to define the problem a little more thoroughly,

I mean when I did research for my book,

The War on Normal People, I was shocked

at what I found where I studied economics in college.

And if you study economics, you're presented

with relatively positive visions

as to what happens if you, for example,

you get rid of a lot of jobs with technology,

that the workers find new roles,

the economy grows, productivity goes up,

and everyone's pretty much okay.

But then when I was writing my book,

I found that that's not actually what happens on the ground,

that half of the manufacturing workers

that lost their jobs in Michigan

and Indiana left the workforce,

filed for disability, got drunk, died early deaths,

and got addicted to drugs.

I mean none of that was in my economics textbook,

if you know what I mean. - I do.

- So then I was like, oh my gosh!

Like what we did to the manufacturing workers we're

about to do to 8.8 million retail workers,

the 2.5 million call center workers,

and most importantly for you in this audience,

the 3.5 million truck drivers and the five million Americans

who work supporting truck drivers

in facilities and truck stops and motels

and diners around the country.

- You call it a Freedom Dividend.

How does the Freedom Dividend work?

- Well the Freedom Dividend, if you can imagine a country

where everyone's getting $1,000 a month

as a right of citizenship,

it would make our families stronger and healthier.

It would create millions of jobs in our communities.

It would improve our mental health.

It would decrease our stress levels.

Would improve relationships.

To me the best path to create that is

to put economic resources into people's hands

in the form of a Freedom Dividend of $1,000 a month,

which would then allow more people

to do the sort of work that either they want

to do or that their community has a need for.

And the goal is to create jobs.

And putting 1000 bucks a month

into people's hands would create

at least two million new jobs just

because the buying power would just go right back

into local businesses and communities.

Now how many of you own stocks

of public companies that issue dividends?

Many of you do, Verizon, Microsoft, Coca-Cola.

So when these companies reach a certain level

of success and maturation, what do they do?

They return money to shareholders.

I'm going to suggest to you all

that the United States of America is

at the exact same point and that we need

to start issuing a dividend to ourselves,

the owners and shareholders of this country.

And when Coca-Cola and Verizon

and Microsoft issue a dividend,

everyone says great job, great management.

It's time for us to do the same thing

for the American people.

$12,000 a year would be a game changer.

The main thing is that if you look at our history,

this is a deeply American idea.

Thomas Paine was for it at the founding of the country.

He called it the citizens' dividend.

Martin Luther King was for it in the '60s.

He called it guaranteed minimum income

and he championed it in 1967, the year,

until he was killed the next year.

Milton Friedman and 1,000 economists

had this study saying this would be tremendous for America.

It was called the negative income tax.

And it passed the House of Representatives

under Richard Nixon in 1971 twice.

And then it became law 11 years later

in one state, where now in that state,

everyone gets between one and $2,000 a year.

And what state is that?

- [Crowd] Alaska!

- And how do they pay for it?

- [Crowd] Oil.

- [Interviewer] Dividend that would go

to every person in the US would be funded how?

- [Andrew] So the headline cost

of this is $2.4 trillion, which sounds like an awful lot.

For reference, the economy is $19 trillion,

up four trillion in the last 10 years.

And the federal budget is four trillion.

So 2.4 trillion seems like an awfully big slug of money,

but if you break it down, the first big thing is

to implement a value-added tax,

which would harvest the gains from artificial intelligence

and big data from the big tech companies

that are gonna benefit from it the most.

Slice, a sliver, of every Amazon transaction,

every Google search, and because our economy is so vast now

at $19 trillion, a value-added tax

at even half the European level would generate

about 800 billion in value. (ding)

- Now the VAT, VAT is generally considered a progressive tax

'cause it's a tax on consumption and spending.

And if you're low-income, yup,

that's where your money's going.

How much are you taking money back

from the very people you're looking to give it to?

- Well you'd have to consume an awful lot

for a mild VAT to eat up $12,000 in additional income.

And so it is true, in a vacuum,

if you just adopted a mild VAT in the US,

you might make it harder on working families.

But if you are increasing the income

of those working families by $12,000 per individual,

you end up increasing the buying power

of approximately the bottom 92% of the population.

The second source of money is that right now we spend

almost $800 billion on welfare programs.

And many people are receiving more

than $1,000 in current benefits.

So we're gonna leave all the programs alone.

But if you think $1,000 cash would be better

than what you're currently receiving,

then you can opt in and your current benefits disappear.

So that reduces the cost of the Freedom Dividend

by between five and $600 billion.

I'm a Democrat and progressive,

and the last thing I'm running on is

to try and take benefits away from people

that they're relying upon for their,

you know, survival or day-to-day expenses.

So the Freedom Dividend is opt-in.

And so if you decide that your current situation is superior

then you're left untouched and no harm done.

I do talk to people who are on these programs.

And some of them would vastly prefer $1,000 cash

because one there's this constant uncertainty

that they're gonna continue getting the welfare benefits.

'Cause there are generally requirements

that are associated with them.

They like live in fear.

And there are also a lot of reporting requirements

that are associated with them.

So it's not that the existing structures are ideal

for many of the people within them.

But if you prefer your current situation,

then the last thing I would wanna do is take

that away from someone.

Now the great parts are the third and fourth parts.

So if you put $1,000 a month into the hands

of American adults who right now,

57% of Americans can't pay an unexpected $500 bill,

they're gonna spend that $1,000 in their community

on car repairs, tutoring for their kids,

the occasional night out.

It's going to go directly into the consumer economy.

And so if you grow the consumer economy

by 12%, we get 500 billion in new tax revenue. (ding)

And then the last 500 billion or so we get

through a combination of cost savings

on incarceration, homelessness services, healthcare.

Because right now we're spending about a trillion dollars

on people showing up in emergency rooms

and hitting our institutions.

So we have to do what good companies do,

which is invest in our people.

- The point of it really, they say

if you give a man a fish,

if you give a man a fishing rod, he can fish.

If you give him one fish, he'll just eat that fish.

Something like that.

- People like my wife, who's at home

with our two young boys, one of whom is autistic.

And right now the market values her work at zero.

The GDP values her work at zero.

If you start putting resources into our hands,

it actually expands what we think of as work.

- Well, now you're talking about paying women

for doing housework and doing work at home, being mothers.

That's a good idea!

- That is a good idea!

- A game changer for the waitress

at the diner who's getting harassed by her boss.

It's a game changer for the single mom

who's stuck in an abusive relationship.

Like we need to put the economic resources

into people's hands.

- Is not universal basic income though kind of socialism

by other means?

- It's very much not. (laughs)

It's capitalism where income doesn't start at zero.

The socialism capitalism dichotomy is decades out of date

and relatively useless.

And I want to quote a friend of mine,

Eric Weinstein, who said this.

He said we never knew that capitalism was going

to get eaten by its son technology.

That's where we are.

And so when someone's like are you a socialist?

Are you a capitalist?

They're essentially taking 20th century economic frameworks

that never anticipated the economy of today.

- Mass inflation?

- No, it will not.

- Why not?

- Well, I'll give you a couple of data points

on the inflation.

So we printed $4 trillion for the banks during the bailout.

And there was no inflation in consumer goods.

And if you look at what's happening right now

in your own life,

a lot of stuff's getting cheaper and better.

That's electronics, clothing,

cars, media, food for the most part.

All that stuff's staying essentially constant

in price or getting cheaper or more sophisticated.

Now what's going up in price?

What's driving us all crazy?

Housing, education, healthcare.

And those three things are not being driven

by the fact that we have lots of money to spend.

It's not being driven by like purchasing power.

- Universal basic income, you're taking

away that dignity, that respect of having a job.

- Well the Freedom Dividend is actually very pro-work

because putting this money into Americans' hands,

that money would circulate over and over

through their neighborhoods and communities.

It would create more than two million jobs

around the country and would also recognize a lot

of the work that's being done in our families

and communities that is not being recognized

by the market.

The second thing is that,

you know what's really destroying the dignity

of work is people feeling like they have

to do jobs that are somewhat exploitative just

in order to survive and then us selling ourselves

that oh that's actually super dignified.

(laughs) It's actually not dignified