you sit down and talk. the democratic presidential candidate who's pushing a universal basic income and warns that robots are coming to take millions of american jobs a one on one with white house hopeful andrew yang on this edition of. welcome to politicking i'm matthew cook in for larry king coming up later in the program the always outspoken ron paul former congressman and three time presidential contender but we begin with andrew yang entrepreneur and democratic white house hopeful he's the founder of venture for america and author of the book the war on normal people the truth about america's disappearing jobs and why universal basic income is our future there's a lot to unpack in that title alone let's get started as andrew joins me from new

york andrew welcome to the program. thanks for having me matthew it's a pleasure to be here and all the best to tell larry in his recovery i felt terrible when i heard the news thank you thank you so much let's jump right in how come you want to be president. on running for president to help us get through the greatest economic and technological transformation in our nation's history donald trump is our president today because we'd automated away four million manufacturing jobs in michigan ohio pennsylvania wisconsin missouri and iowa all the states the swing states needed to win and my friends and tell acknowledging in silicon valley no that what we did to manufacturing jobs we are now going to do to retail jobs call center jobs fast food jobs truck driving jobs and on and on through the economy so i'm running for president to let america know it is not immigrants that are causing these problems it is technology and the evolution of our economy and then we need to advance in our own understanding of our place in the economy which should be at the center and that's why i'm proposing

a universal basic income of one thousand dollars per month per adult so i want to get into the universal basic income but first trump and his cabinet are always boasting about the job numbers how manufacturing jobs are increasing in his administration is this not true is he skewing the numbers well it is interesting if you flash back to two thousand and sixteen donald trump was always talking about how bogus the unemployment numbers were and now that he's president he's singing a very different tune our labor force participation rate right now is where together is sixty three percent the same levels as close to rican ecuadoran close to a multi decade low and almost one in five prime working age american men has now worked in a year and this is despite record high g.d.p. and really rosy looking headline unemployment numbers but if you dig a little deeper unfortunately the disarray in the distress is still there so what were all these workers what are they doing they're not engaged in the workforce what you're saying is that they're just not looking for work at all and so that's

why they're not being counted. yeah that's right if american stops looking for work they're no longer considered in the labor force or unemployed and this is what happened to literally hundreds of thousands of displaced manufacturing workers in the midwest in the south when we automated away those four million jobs almost half of those workers left the workforce and never worked again and of that group about half fall for disability so that's what's happening to many many americans around the country fully twenty percent of working age adults are on disability in some parts of the country so are they actually on disability did they get injured on the job or is this are these some of these mental health issues that are coming about as a result of not being able to find meaningful work well it's it's great that you ask that because mental health disorders are actually one of the leading causes of disability in terms of successful claims there are a lot of americans who claim back pain and and mental disorders and have

doctors documenting that these problems are real so this is affecting hundreds of thousands of americans around the country that have actually started receiving disability payments so the idea that robots and automation are going to take over jobs sounds like science fiction for a lot of people can you just walk us through quickly what you see happening in the next ten to fifteen to twenty five years. well it's true because it's not like a robot is going to walk into your office or place of employment and just say i'm here to take your job but what's happening instead is it's affecting our systems underneath the surface where thirty percent of american malls and stores are going to close in the next four years and anyone watching this or listening to this can see stores closing around them and the reason they're closing is because amazon is soaking up twenty billion dollars in commerce every year and that's pushing the malls into oblivion now you don't think that the robots cause the malls to close but if you go to an amazon fulfillment center you'll find wall to wall robots so

this is how our economy is evolving it's not something where it's a science fiction scenario but instead it's an undercurrent underneath the surface so can you describe your centerpiece policy proposal which is this universal basic income i think a lot of people hear oh a thousand dollars a month where is that really going to get me is this some kind of gimmick or a bribe to get voters interested in your campaign it's really not can you explain how the u.b.i. the universal basic in income addresses the issues of automation. well yes if you look at our nation's history it's actually been with us from the beginning thomas paine was ford at the founding he called it the citizens dividend martin luther king championed it in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven called it the guaranteed minimum income milton friedman in one thousand economists signed a study saying this would be tremendous for america and one state has had a dividend for the last forty years and that's alaska where everyone in the state gets between one and two thousand dollars a year no questions asked to your point this would help us address the problems of

automation by putting buying power into americans hands it would make it so that consumers can continue to participate even as the jobs start to go away it would also create two million new jobs in our economy because of the increased consumer demand where a lot of people would be spending that money in their communities and those that money would circulate sever. times over it's going to help expand the types of work that we can do because many americans would pursue different kinds of opportunities if they had the sort of resources that moved with them wherever they went it's really interesting that you use the term that others have used the term dividends you describe it as being as if in american citizen is a shareholder in or are a part owner of the country so shouldn't citizens receive some sort of dividend yeah and this is something that obviously companies do all the time if a company declares a dividend and starts distributing funds to shareholders we applaud management and

that's really what we need throughout the country because if you look at the trends of this fourth industrial revolution that we're in the midst of the big winners are going to be amazon and google and facebook and who are the biggest tech companies and right now the public is not seeing much of that value in their own pocket books or wallets where you can see amazon paid zero in federal taxes in twenty eighteen and so if you think about it big picture you have a trillion dollar tech companies soaking up tens of billions in value and millions of jobs out of communities and the public is getting zero in return that's why we need to have a dividend for all americans in order to help again manage this transition that we're in the midst of so why a thousand dollars a month one thousand dollars a month twelve thousand a year that's not really enough to live on what is that number supposed to be used for and what does it do. well twelve thousand dollars a month would be a game changer for millions of american families because right now seventy eight percent of americans are living paycheck to paycheck fifty seven percent say they

can't afford unexpected five hundred dollar bill and a thousand dollars a month is the right level because it also wart won't distort our labor markets overnight where no americans going to quit their job twelve thousand dollars a year which is below the poverty line of twelve thousand seven hundred dollars a year unless their job was truly exploitive or abusive and they've been trying to quit for a long time so it's not enough to push people out of the workforce but it is enough to reduce our stress levels improve our health improve the dynamism of our labor market and help put people on a different path toward the future and help really manage the transition that each individual family and workplace and business is undergoing so your book is called the war on normal people and the truth about america's disappearing jobs and why this universal basic income is our future who are normal people at this point in america. well normal people i know the title is meant to be somewhat provocative but normal people the average american and so the five most common job categories

the united states are in ministre different clerical including call centers retail food service and food preparation truck driving and transportation and manufacturing those are the normal american jobs because only thirty three percent of americans graduate from college the average american worker is a high school graduate and as you can can see that most of the industries i just named are actually filled by by high school grads so that's the normal american and that's what we have to look out for because we are decimating the opportunities that are available to americans that don't have a certain level of skill or education so if normal americans are struggling how does that affect their decision making so you've referenced a fascinating study in your book scarcity and stress and its effect on i.q. levels can you explain that. yeah those us agree i thought it was fascinating to

when i saw the results so some social scientists studied the i.q. levels of people who were experiencing financial stress and they found that just not being able to pay your bill or being told about a hypothetical bill that you couldn't afford is enough to reduce i.q. scores by thirteen points or one standard deviation so if you have the feeling that america is getting less reasonable and less rational it's very likely that we are getting less reasonable less rational because if seventy eight percent of us are living paycheck to paycheck and we're experiencing this financial insecurity all the time it actually is reducing our functional i.q. by one standard deviation and so just by putting this money into americans hands will actually improve our collective intelligence and decision making in rationality and likely ease much of the political polarization that we've been seeing these last number of years one of the other really interesting principles that you discuss in your book is the idea of rethinking our economic policy and

graduating from this left right socialism capitalism type of thinking and you are calling for a new way which is human capitalism what is human capitalism. so we're seeing the headlines where everyone celebrating these record high g.d.p. levels meanwhile our country's life expectancy has declined for the last three years due to higher rates of suicides and drug overdoses which have both now overtaken vehicle deaths as a leading cause of death for the first time in our history so you have to ask yourself what is our g.d.p. measuring for people are literally dying younger and so instead of g.d.p. which is something we made up almost one hundred years ago during the great depression we should actually be using our health and life expectancy our mental health and freedom from substance abuse childhood success rates clean air and clean water. average income and affordability and use those as the actual measurements

for our economic and social progress and if we had those other measurements then we could celebrate when for example we brought the overdose rate down or our mental health improved because g.d.p. is going to go up in up with things like ai and self driving vehicles but more and more americans going to get left behind and as someone who's run businesses if you have the wrong measurements you will never make progress we need to have the right goals for economy and then we can make progress much more meaningfully together andrea thanks so much for your time today this book is absolutely visionary the title is the war on normal people and it's out now available everywhere i highly recommend it former congressman ron paul is next when politicking continues.

to receive russian and it's. you know world of big partisan movies. and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the troops the time is now we're watching closely watching the hawks.

aeroflot russian airlines. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics small business i'm showbusiness i'll see that. during the great depression which i'm old enough to remember there was most of my family were unemployed working class there wasn't it was bed you know much worse objective listen today but there was an expectation of the things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hopefulness there isn't today today's america where shade by the

ton principles a concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy attack solidarity engineer elections manufacture consent another prince holds according to no i'm chomsky one set of rules for the rich opposite a poor. that's what happens when you put her into the hands of a narrow sector of will switch will is dedicated to increasing power for chills just as you'd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks about the modern civilization of america. welcome back to politicking i'm matthew cook sitting in for larry king. ron paul now joins me from lake jackson texas you know him as the outspoken former

republican congressman from texas he made three bits for the white house twice as a conservative and once as the libertarian party nominee presently he's the host of the ron paul liberty report it's a pleasure to welcome him back to the show i dr paul. that he was nice to be with you today so i want to talk about the economy shortly but first can you give us your opinion of attorney general william barres handling of the moeller report. well i'm not an expert on that because for some reason i can't get involved intensely but you know from a more superficial viewpoint and seeing in light of all the fighting and fuming in the politicking going on. he comes across as handling himself pretty well but i wouldn't be the one to dissect every statement from a legal listing viewpoint most of this i think is just generally politic and you know not so much and they're always sorting out in great detail all the

constitutionality the legalities of this i think ninety nine percent of what i had to listen to in the last you know couple years it's just been two groups angling against each other and yet at the same time i see both these groups getting along very well when they have to vote for war and spending and welfare and all these things they do quite well they come together so i think some of these other things that seem to be very important and a lot of people consider important i think sometimes i see him as a distraction from some real issues i think if they spent half that much time or a quarter of this much time trying to figure out monetary policy in the federal reserve i think the time would be better spent so do you think president trump has been cleared of any wrongdoing and we just shouldn't focus on that relationship with russia anymore. well you know i sort of think that is the case i don't think nobody has convinced me that he's in some deep collusion you know with russia

so you know i didn't i haven't bought into that side of the argument but i just think that there's been a lot of exaggeration and everybody aiming for a political advantage but i don't think that they have any from my viewpoint any evidence that there's some real collusion going on some conspiracy. i i when this subject comes up and they say you know what they were russia was doing this and this and that they they were interfering and i said well you know from the viewpoint of myself dealing in american politics and being in the congress i felt and still feel more responsible for dealing with our own policy and when you think about you know collusion and all of this russia and valmont i think that is a distraction because just think how you name a city just about everybody in the media and run public and democrat then none of

them seem to be caring about the attempt in venezuela and the many we we did our country's been involved in more of this activity a much more vicious i mean not too long ago it was ukraine we dealt with and that is strong evidence to show that we have so i think they're really missing the point and there's a bit of hypocrisy goes on when we are outlandishly you know all maybe russia and china and somebody did this at the same time we ought to look to ourselves what happened i just think that we're in too many places and too much mischief and that we ought to deal with our own set of standards and i think there's a lot of room for improvement well let's focus on some of the issues that you think we ought to be paying attention to when you mention venezuela can you give us a status report what's happening there and what should be what should we be focusing on how how is the trump administration interfering in what's happening in venezuela. so what's again i would start by just following up that. we

are too much involved i mean it's been two years now that we really accelerated on the sanctions we've been involved other ministrations republican democrat have been involved in putting on sanctions what we did after fifty years with cuba cuba they were an angel still are not angels we are angels but we put sanctions and played this game for fifty years all we did was solidify the power of cat. and this is the reason where i was a skeptic i think you know is he going to pull this off and and and and have this coup because he wants to be a he's been declared president by united states you know which is is a little bit absurd. if that's what's been going on but the coup failed our policies are failing so if they need any guidance at all from from my viewpoint i was

a just get out of there leave me alone don't get off with the get it get rid of all the sanctions yes there's a lot of people dying down there kids are getting medicines and food but believe me we haven't done anything to help so let's talk about some of the presidential candidates if trump is going to be the standard bearer for the republicans what do you think about the democratic candidates right now. who do you like and who do you not like. well there's a lot of choices there if you said i'm going to give you a quick run i want you to name all twenty i did say just give me a d. minus. the bard is by far the very very best and she's very very liberal when it comes to economics we pry wouldn't agree with too much on economics but. but she is good on the foreign policy she does not want these engagement which is an economic issue we'd save a lot of money you know by not being engaged like this but she's she's the most

intelligent and would be the best if we had to pick one of them to be our president i think she would be giving us the best chance for bringing about peace let's switch gears for a second and talk about a longstanding philosophy you've had which is getting rid of the federal reserve why do you want to do that. because i don't want. our country to end up in total bankruptcy destruction of the currency and an economic system that collapses like zimbabwe or our venezuela. power in government which is something that a libertarian should and is always challenging but power usually goes with the people who control the money and the founders knew this they were very very strong on saying don't ever use anything other than silver and gold as legal tender and don't have a central bank so those were the directions of course

a hundred years ago it was decided well no we have to have a central bank we have to have government spend money that they don't hang out and just think now of the some of the proposals coming from the far left everything is for free or just print the money. there's nothing. in the case that that is a good sound policy no i think it in dorset is if you happen to be a good conservative you say well we spent too much money on runaway welfare and that's one thing if you don't like all the wars it's another thing you don't spend if you think debt eventually will cause a problem and it will it is and is just a fiction to think that you can print all this money and pay all these bills but it is pervasive i got interested in politics over the federal reserve in the end of the gold standard i remember the day vividly august fifty thousand nine hundred seventy one and that was when nixon said no more link we don't want any more

restraints on printing money and believe me we've had a lot of inflation and a lot of ups and downs and right now we're at the end stages of having once again the biggest now. boom ever ever history in the world there's there's more distortion worldwide because we've had the reserve currency but that has enhanced our ability to be the dictator we do have wealth and we do have power and we have weapons but it's all based on debt. and that debt would be impossible you know with a sound monetary system we would have to pay for these things coming out of savings not the fact that we would just print money and the world loves our dollar they have and they still do to go along to get along long time yeah but it always fails the test have been out there the hard metals that have been used for my for over six thousand years they always have a test of the time but paper money has been tested quite a few times even in our own country and it always fails and this paper money is

going to fail is just a matter of time and what i want is the protection of liberty when the economic system collapses then you have a real threat to liberty and that of course is my biggest concern when donald trump took office he vowed to eliminate national debt and now we're we're topping twenty two trillion in for the first time. what's happening how is that possible. well it is rather interesting it's fascinating because conservatives are you know preach a lot about deficits and we get them how do we get them in a congress and we get them in the presidency and they go they make it worse and actually the spending is not nearly as bad as we generally paint the liberals you know when you have a liberal president and a liberal congress they're going to you know you know spend more the more than the

republicans but they don't i don't think either side believes that deficits matter . and this is a result this is this is sort of selfish politicking and they do it herself serving interests but it's also a result of the educational system that we've had for fifty sixty seventy years and that's keynesianism in economics and they see deficits don't matter you can listen to them today don't worry about it you just print the money and you have guys. like our federal reserve board chairman say well if you really need it just drop the money. helicopter but it doesn't work and all it does is encourage the size of government and there are pretty sour own charge to show the bigger the government the more spending the poorer the people and the less liberty i don't think there's any doubt about it might not happen you know exactly on the same day you predict but that is what happens we don't need a big government if we trust people to take care of themselves and put the

responsibility on people believe me you will have a much happier society if people feel good about self-reliance but we teach not self-reliance because we have an economic system we're deficits don't matter dr king's dr paul thank you so much as usual we're just it's just the tip of the iceberg so i hope you'll come back and we can continue the conversation and thank you so much for your time today and thing. you for joining us on this edition of politicking and also thanks to larry king for letting me sit in this chair today remember we love hearing from you join the conversation on larry's facebook page and as always you can share your thoughts on twitter by tweeting at kings things and using the politicking hash tag i also invite you to join me on facebook on my page matthew cooke official and that's all for this edition of politicking.

aeroflot russian and lights. you know world of big partisan movies lot and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the bats and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks.

aeroflot russian and lights. we have no political agenda here we just if it if it costs more to get out you get when you get it out. a loss it's a minus sign that's it if you can't figure that out. of a political agenda. you're blinded by by.

the u.s. attorney general refusing to testify before the house judiciary committee on his handling of the report the session was labeled a circus with one democratic member. should have shown up today and answered questions to go straight through the. body still and the circus continues over to. the u.s. is set to continue its support for the saudi intervention in yemen after the senate fails to override president veto of a resolution that would have ended u.s. engagement in the war. within weeks co-founder julian assange. during.