FORWARD

by Andrew Yang

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the banking giant JPMorgan Chase, and Ray Dalio, the influential founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater, have both argued that we should declare our economy a national emergency because it is not working for most Americans anymore. And that was before the pandemic.

The cost of the opioid epidemic has been estimated at more than $78 billion every year,

And climate change, by the year 2100, will be costing us nearly $2 trillion per year. It’s already costing us hundreds of billions of dollars just in disaster mitigation and cleanup, much less the lives and livelihoods lost.

Human capitalism has three core tenets: Humanity is more important than money. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. Markets exist to serve our common goals and interests.

Connecting health care to employment never made sense, but we keep doubling down on it, creating a bizarre patchwork system that freezes workers in place or fails to cover them during a transition.

value-added tax (VAT), a policy that’s currently in place in 160 of the world’s 195 countries. As the name suggests, these taxes tax the value that any company adds at every step of the production process. If you buy a blender from Amazon, every company that touched the blender from manufacturing to distribution would pay a portion of the tax based on how much value they added to the blender before it got to you.

proven, and it works. Why are VATs so popular throughout the world? They’re easy to implement and difficult to dodge. Because each company is responsible for paying taxes on the value it adds to a product, each company has an incentive to prevent other companies from cheating the system. You could dial down the VAT on consumer staples, like food and diapers, to avoid hurting middle-class consumers, and dial it up on luxury goods, like yachts and artificial intelligence.

The first is practical: repealing Citizens United requires a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority. The second is the fact that companies have plenty of ways to exert influence even if their contributions to super PACs have a limit. They can donate to issue areas or special interests or encourage employees to give to a particular candidate. It’s not like companies were devoid of influence prior to the Citizens United ruling in 2010. The third is that money would still dominate politics, just to a less egregious degree. As noted above, political donors would yet reflect a tiny band of the population that tends to have distinct preferences and characteristics.

There are presently 250 million voting-age adults in the United States. If only 20 percent of eligible voters allocated their $100 to given candidates in an election cycle, that would be $5 billion, enough to counterbalance all the money that is currently being sourced by companies and special interests.

One exciting thing about this idea is that it can be adopted by a city or state instead of just the federal government.

New York City matches small donations eight to one for those candidates who agree to contribution and spending limits.

Maine has a robust system of publicly funding state candidates who gather $5 donations and then eschew further private funding. And Seattle in 2016 approved four $25 democracy vouchers that voters could use on local candidates who abide by spending limits.

Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter propose a system where party primaries are replaced by a top-five primary that is open to all voters. Candidates could identify themselves with a party or not. The top-five finishers would then go on to the general election.

California made this change in 2012, and the results have been compelling. The number of races deemed competitive immediately doubled. Legislators seemed to notice and became more responsive. The approval rating of California’s legislature shot up from 10 percent in 2010 to 50 percent in 2016.

If a candidate gets more than 50 percent as voters’ first choice, that candidate wins. That makes sense; anyone who gets more than 50 percent would win under any system. If no one breaks 50 percent, then the least popular candidate—the one who got the fewest 1s—is discarded, and that candidate’s voters get reassigned to their second choice. You continue this process until a candidate gets over 50 percent, and that candidate is the winner.

The benefits of ranked-choice voting are profound. You don’t need to worry about any candidate being a spoiler. You can vote however you’d like without worrying about “wasting” a vote. It expresses voter preferences better. The winner has to get 50 percent—something that doesn’t always happen with plurality voting if you have more than two candidates

It diminishes the incentives to campaign negatively, because you’re running against multiple opponents and people will notice if you start trashing your opponents. And it favors coalition building and reaching out to different types of constituents.

Ranked-choice voting has been adopted in more than a dozen cities across the country in the last several years, most notably New York City, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. In addition to...

A study of seven cities using ranked-choice voting for municipal elections found that candidates focused more on iss...

Here are some of the arguments commonly made for term limits: Lawmakers would be more motivated to pass successful policy if they knew that their time in D.C. was limited. They would become less beholden to the ways of Washington and to trying to climb the ladder within their own party. There would be a period of time when they did not worry about fundraising or reelection and could do what they knew to be right without any fear or concern. It would ensure a sense of rejuvenation as new leaders with new ideas regularly rotated into Washington without being there for literally decades. It would mean a likely end to the gerontocracy.

We see that the longer you serve in Congress, the less connected, the less responsive, the less accountable you can become to the people you represent…If we truly have faith in those we serve…then let’s help clear the way for new leaders to step up and bring their unique experiences, expertise, and energy to bear on the problems and opportunities before us.

The Senate eventually changed the rules in 1975 to their present form so that you can break the filibuster with sixty votes. There is nothing in the Constitution saying you need sixty votes to do anything;

The Senate has voluntarily reduced its ability to pass legislation because of the equivalent of a typo more than two hundred years ago.

restoring earmarks, establishing measures of legislative success, and abolishing the filibuster.

let’s call it the American Scorecard—that can be modified and reexamined over time. Each member of Congress could select a set number of goals they believe in from a menu of options. Examples could include poverty rate, life expectancy, rates of business formation, overdose deaths, government efficiency, income growth and affordability, environmental sustainability, highway fatalities, recidivism rates, clean drinking water—basically

“deliberative polling,” a system first developed by the Stanford professor James Fishkin. What might this look like in practice? The first step would be to gather together a representative sample of the public. Then this “civic jury” would weigh various courses of action on policy questions with the help of briefing materials provided by interest groups on all sides of an issue. The group would report its viewpoints both at the beginning and at the end of the deliberation process, and the shifts in their thinking would be taken as a direction for policy makers. The idea is not so different from a big company whose leaders decide to establish a diverse working group of employees from across its ranks to research and advise the company on a particular problem. Because the company was transparent about meaningfully seeking the counsel of the working group, the rest of the employees are more likely to get on board with the eventual decisions that are made. One enormous advantage of this system is that media organizations would have a field day on the findings and would likely interview participants to determine what they found most convincing and compelling. Countries as diverse as Iceland, Mongolia, and Ireland have adopted versions of these gatherings to suggest constitutional amendments. Unlike prospective civic juries, Congress does not much look like a representative set of Americans on any of a host of dimensions: age, gender, wealth, education, race, and so on. But it’s...

Here’s a proposal: ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after their service but give them a stipend of $100,000 a year for ten years if they work for a nonprofit or academic institution afterward.

The main lever that we can access without Congress is to get ranked-choice voting and open primaries in states across the country.

The time is due for us to recognize that journalism is a vital public good for a democracy. We should fund it publicly as an investment in our own society. I know some people reading this just groaned. “Oh no. Journalism can’t be publicly funded.

Consider that publicly funded journalism exists in other countries and it works well. The British Broadcasting Corporation—BBC—is funded primarily through a license fee charged to every household that owns a television set.

The majority of parents agree: 66 percent of parents named PBS Kids as the most educational media brand in one poll, with Disney a distant second at 8 percent.

leave. Steve says, “Local journalism is a must to increase civic engagement and decrease polarization. Newspaper revenues have shrunk by $23 billion over the past twelve years, and the number of reporters has plummeted by 60 percent since 2000. We have to acknowledge that philanthropy and public support will need to sustain local journalism.”

Steve and his partners at the National Newspaper Association, the American Journalism Project, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and half a dozen or so other journalism nonprofits have proposed a plan to invest $3 to $5 billion in local journalism and help organizations convert to nonprofits. The Rebuild Local News plan includes a $250 refundable tax credit for each person to pay for a subscription or donation to a local news source, a credit of up to $5,000 for any small business to buy local advertising, and a $300 million fund that would match three to one any donations to a journalism nonprofit. They also recommend that the IRS define public service journalism as a viable tax-deductible nonprofit activity and allow newspaper chains to divest local newspapers into locally owned nonprofits or public benefit corporations in return for enhanced tax benefits. Federal advertising budgets would be spent on local media organizations, and tax credits would be provided for maintaining journalists and staffers. Five thousand local reporters would be sent to local newsrooms through national service programs. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which includes some of these measures, has attracted fifty co-sponsors in Congress as of this writing, from both parties. You can see the whole plan at RebuildLocalNews.org.

In practice, this meant that broadcasters who aired commentary on one side of an issue would then make sure that the other point of view was also represented. Though there was no rule that equal time must be afforded, if you presented one side, you had to at least make space for opposing perspectives. This rule was repealed in 1987 by the Reagan administration, which tried to deregulate just about everything under the sun. There has recently been some interest in reviving it because people believe—correctly—that the end of the fairness doctrine led to a more polarized media landscape and population.

The FCC could also more rigorously require that segments be labeled either “News” or “Opinion” and require that what is presented as news be objective and free from commentary.

section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Section 230 says that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Instead of saying “Platforms are not responsible for the content they publish that is created by someone else,” we could change the standard to “Social media platforms are responsible for any content they amplify.”

“All data relevant to misinformation, usage patterns, use by minors, and the health and integrity of the public shall be made freely available in real time to the public for research, commentary, and examination.” If you want the franchise and a liability shield, you’re going to have to both take responsibility for any content that you amplify and are profiting from and then open up.

Facebook—which includes Instagram—reported advertising revenues in the United States of about $34 billion a year in 2019. Here are the user bases and advertising revenues of the top social media companies in the United States: Platform Number of users Annual ad revenue in billions Annual ad revenue per user Monthly ad revenue per user Facebook / Instagram 183 million $34 $186 $16 YouTube 205 million $4.4 $21.50 $1.80 Twitter 68.7 million $1.94 $28.23 $2.35 Snapchat 80 million $1.1 $13.75 $1.14 TikTok 100 million $1.2 (est.) — $1 (est.) Total: $22.29

Michael Grunwald wrote in Politico in 2020, “There is a line of thinking that America has entered a kind of postmodern political era where the appearance of governing is just as politically powerful as actual governing, because most Americans now live in partisan spin bubbles that insulate them from facts on the ground.” Passing laws, solving problems, and measuring impacts don’t matter anymore. You can simply argue for your version of reality and aligned media outlets will trumpet and reinforce that narrative to your people. Value statements and virtue signaling have assumed the role of laws and policy for many in the day-to-day back-and-forth of cable news.

Speaking to a group is now an enormous expression of alignment or allegiance. Neither side can pass laws, so we are reduced to warring languages and symbols.

babied.” In his book The Righteous Mind the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tried to answer a fundamental question: Why is it that well-meaning people can disagree so violently when it comes to politics? He argues that there are six fundamental human values that cross all cultures and constitute our universal sense of morality: caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Haidt argues that conservatives’ ability to use and appeal to all six values gives them a broader moral palette that gives them an advantage in political communication. They can hit more varied notes that ring true to different types of people.

Meanwhile, those who are more politically attentive were more likely to try to answer “What will supporting this policy say about me?” They are joining a group. This indicates something very important—that political engagement ends up forming an allegiance based on perceived values and identity as opposed to perceived advantage or disadvantage of a policy.

basic psychological dispositions related to experiential openness—a general dimension of personality tapping tolerance for threat and uncertainty in one’s environment.”

Ezra Klein summarized the research in Why We’re Polarized: “The common thread is that openness to experience—and the basic optimism that drives it—is associated with liberalism, while conscientiousness, a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward disruptive change, connects to conservatism.” Klein emphasizes that these are not positives or negatives but simply preferences tied to psychological profiles.

Indeed, Ezra Klein points out that exposure to news from the other point of view actually tends to increase, not decrease, one’s polarization.

Dr. David Eddy, who originated evidence-based medicine and was a mathematician as well as a physician, described his approach as “tying the policy to evidence instead of standard-of-care practices or the beliefs of experts.” One possible antidote to the inchoate political discussion is to adopt an approach of fact-based governing—that is, advocate policies based on their ability to deliver an improvement to some attribute or measurement of societal progress or health.

we had lost five million manufacturing jobs across various states primarily to automation or that labor force participation rates and business formation rates had already plummeted to multi-decade lows.

I’d reframe tax day as “Revenue Day” and make it a federal holiday where we celebrate everything the federal government does for its citizens. You could invite families from around the country to the White House to celebrate another great year and thank them for supporting our way of life. Make it a party. We would give everyone the day off to spend with our families.