# Andrew Yang Entrepreneur and political figure best known for making [[Universal Basic Income]] a mainstream American policy debate. His 2020 Democratic presidential campaign centered on the **Freedom Dividend** — $1,000/month to every American adult over 18, framed as a response to automation-driven job displacement and financed largely by a value-added tax on large technology companies. Yang did not win a primary, but he permanently changed the public coding of basic income: after 2020 most Americans encountered UBI as a tech-adjacent progressive proposal. That framing obscures the idea's longer and largely right-wing lineage running from [[Thomas Paine]] through [[Milton Friedman]]'s [[Negative Income Tax]] to [[Charles Murray]]'s *[[In Our Hands]]* — a $10,000 version published fourteen years before the Freedom Dividend. Yang campaigned explicitly on the [[Alaska Permanent Fund]] as proof of concept — the one American jurisdiction already paying a universal unconditional dividend, and a Republican one. Subsequently ran for New York City mayor (2021) and founded the Forward Party, a centrist third-party effort. > [!note] Stub — fill out > To expand: Venture for America and the *Smart People Should Build Things* / *The War on Normal People* argument; the Freedom Dividend's VAT financing and its critics; the 2021 mayoral run; Forward Party structure, funding, and ballot-access record; his relationship to the tech-right AI-displacement discourse. ## See also [[Universal Basic Income]] · [[Alaska Permanent Fund]] · [[Technological Unemployment]] · [[Negative Income Tax]] · [[In Our Hands]]