presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang greets supporters at the New Hampshire Democratic Party state convention in Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S. It grants $1,000 per month to all citizens over 18, including recent high school grads, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.įILE PHOTO: Democratic 2020 U.S. Townsend organized his supporters into clubs, whereas Yang wants website visitors and Twitter followers to bolster his campaign.Īnd Yang’s “ freedom dividend” – what the program is called if scaled up – would be more expensive because of its much broader reach. Yang’s catchy idea may catch on tooĪs with any historical analogy, there are limits. After voting down the Townsend Plan in June 1939, Congress amended the Social Security Act, making it more generous to the poorer elderly and speeding up payments for Social Security. Still, Townsend’s well-mobilized campaign and his infectious idea of a generous universal pension pressured Roosevelt and Congress to act. Roosevelt dismissed the plan as a false “ shortcut to utopia.” Yang’s plan is similarly criticized as not adding up. The clubs declared the tests successful, and, in 1937, Washington state joined California in formally asking Congress to adopt the Townsend Plan.īut the plan was still derided by many mainstream economists as being unlikely to pay for itself and to end the Depression. Life Magazine devoted an entire spread to a Chelen, Washington, senior citizen’s spending spree. They gave the winners $200, assessed the quality of their purchases and calculated its economic impact. Soon Townsend clubs in Washington, California, New Jersey and elsewhere decided to test the plan on randomly chosen club members. Members of Congress began signing on in support. That year the Townsend Plan was mentioned more than a thousand times in national newspapers. By early 1936, some 2 million Americans, almost all of them older, had joined around 8,000 Townsend clubs, paying a dime a month with the expectation that their support might help the plan become law. These Townsend clubs spread from California across the nation. Most seniors were going unsupported, with at least 70% mired in poverty.Īlso like Yang, Townsend didn’t wait for the federal government to pass his plan and instead began organizing “clubs” to promote the idea.
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And even then, only those aged 65 or older in a limited number of industries would qualify.Īt the time, the Great Depression was in full swing and unemployment was over 20%. Townsend ridiculed Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 Social Security Act, whose flagship old-age program was not scheduled to pay anyone until 1942. Townsend’s proposal, like Yang’s, was an explicit critique of bureaucratic cash transfers with delayed payoffs, restricted beneficiaries or income tests. Not only would their money worries end, he reasoned, but their renewed consumer spending would jump-start the economy and their retirement would reduce competition for jobs. He claimed that when he saw older women rooting around in his trash for food, an idea hit him: The federal government should guarantee an income of $200 per month – about $3,700 today – for Americans 60 years and older who agreed to stop working. Francis Everett Townsend was a 66-year-old unemployed physician living in Long Beach, California. I found that in times of economic insecurity, simple, straightforward guaranteed income proposals can be highly influential, even if they aren’t ultimately adopted. I wrote a book about that plan, the organization behind it and the man who promoted it throughout the country.
It’s a direct echo of the Townsend Plan, the brainchild of another political novice who also believed that the solution to economic disruption and automation almost a century ago was to guarantee an income. At least half a million people have entered Yang’s basic income raffle.Īlthough he called his idea “unprecedented,” that’s not entirely true. The announcement of a test run of his signature universal basic income proposal, which Yang argues is necessary to counter automation’s threat to millions of American jobs, garnered cheers from the student audience at the September debate and gave his candidacy a boost. Entrepreneur and political novice Andrew Yang is hoping a wild gambit will help him win the Democratic presidential nomination: give 10 American families US$1,000 a month.
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