Entrepreneur and Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang asserted in a Friday interview with Chris Hayes that he would “100%” be comfortable with using force against foreign nations to defend U.S. interests.
Hayes asked Yang if he felt that, as an entrepreneur with no governing experience, he had the ability to order someone to die, or order someone to kill in battle. (RELATED: Democratic Candidate Andrew Yang Promises Government Crackdown On ‘Misinformation’)
“Well, one of the paramount responsibilities of the commander-in-chief is to keep the American people safe. While raining death on other people is not my first choice, if that’s what it would take to keep the American people safe, I’m 100% ready to do just that,” Yang answered.
Yang was also asked about how he planned to pay for his central idea of a “universal basic income,” and how he planned to execute that policy proposal.
“Martin Luther King championed it and called it the ‘guaranteed minimum income.’ It’s the policy where every citizen in America gets a certain amount of money to meet our basic needs, no questions asked. So my plan would put $1,000 a month in the hands of every American adult starting at age 18. This would make children and families stronger, improve our health, nutrition, graduation rates and help millions of Americans make transitions in this time of historic change,” he responded. Hayes followed up by asking if that would end up costing the nation an additional $33 billion per month.
“The price tag is a bit less than that. In part, because we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on many, many programs that in part substitute out the costs. But the big change we have to make to afford this freedom dividend is who’s going to win—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, the biggest tech companies. We have to put the American people in a position to benefit from those innovations.”
Yang recently cleared the Democratic Party’s bar of support to join the first presidential primary debates Monday evening. “We did it!!! THANK YOU, everyone, who supported us to make it happen!! First stop debates next stop White House!!!” Yang said Monday on Twitter, announcing that he had earned 65,000 individual donors.