From the April 12 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:
Kilmeade suggests universal basic income would be “robbing other people of their ability to be a self-made success story”
Doocy dismisses success of Alaska's petroleum dividend “because they live there”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): Andrew, when we aired those sound bites and we came to yours people in the audience were laughing. It sounds great, $12,000 a year for every adult. But how are you going to pay for that?
ANDREW YANG (DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE): Yeah, so you have to look up who are going the biggest winners from artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and trucks and new technologies. It's going to be Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber -- which just filed its documents to go public. And the American people are going to see very very little of the gains from that innovation. We all saw that Amazon paid literally zero in federal taxes.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Aren't we going to work there?
YANG: Well of course some people will work there but most of us are not going to work there. And the truth is if you're at Amazon, like you said, Steve, if you go to an Amazon fulfillment center, it's more robots than people. And if you talk to anyone in Amazon that is very much the plan.
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): So your book, The War on Normal People, talks about how people are being replaced by automation and changing technologies and things like that. But people are still going to need money, and so you're suggesting a universal basic income. But Andrew, you know there have been experiments in other parts of the United States and in other parts of the world where it just hasn't worked.
YANG: Well, you don't even need to look across the globe. All you have to do is look at Alaska which has had a petroleum dividend for almost 40 years. And it's wildly popular, has created thousands of jobs, has improved people's health.
DOOCY: Because they live there.
YANG: And this was passed by a Republican governor. He said, look, who would you rather get the money, the government who is going to mess it up somehow, or you the Alaskan people. And the Alaskan people said us, and now everyone's very very thrilled about it.
DOOCY: Explain the way the dividend works.
YANG: So the way the petroleum dividend works is they put aside the oil money and they said look, whatever profits come out from the pipeline then it goes to the Alaskan people. So everyone in Alaska is getting between 1 and $2,000 a year no questions asked. We need to do the same thing with technology and the new innovations in our economy. We can create a lot of wealth. But the question is right now who is going to see that wealth? It is not going to be most Americans. It's going to be people who happen to be shareholders in these companies.
KILMEADE: Andrew, who gave you something in life? Who gave you something for free in life? Are you a self-made success story? Why are you robbing other people of their ability to be a self-made success story?
YANG: Well, the first people I thought of was my parents. I'm the son of immigrants. My parents came to this country to create a better life for me and my brother. And my father generated 69 U.S. patents for GE and IBM. I love this country. I believe this country has been the exemplar of innovation and success over the last number of decades. But we have to face facts about the fact that our economy is evolving in ways that's pushing more and more Americans to the sidelines, and then telling those Americans that are pushed to the sidelines like “hey, you can be a multimillionaire success story, too,” while Amazon's making 30% of the stores in their town close, does not seem to me to be an honest exchange.
KILMEADE: Your heart's in the right place.
Previously:
Watch a Fox panel become speechless after a guest defends universal basic income
Fox Business panel panics over Democratic proposals to tax the wealthy: “That is communist”