>> Dave Chappelle has endorsed Andrew Yang.
And recently there was a campaign video featuring Chappelle and his reasoning for why he feels
Yang is the best candidate to represent the country.
Now, let me just warn you guys, Chappelle has gotten a lot of backlash from what he
says in this video.
I'm really not interested in trashing Chappelle.
But I do want to talk about the argument that he makes here and just kinda dissect it with
some facts and some statistics.
With that said, let's take a look.
>> We would take a poll in Dayton and say, what would you rather have, $12,000 a year
or health insurance?
Everyone's taking the money.
But health insurance is great, but groceries are necessary too, and people in Dayton are
having a hard time getting the things they need.
I started imagining what a universal basic income would do for my community, and it would
save it almost instantly.
We recently suffered mass shootings and all kinds of, everything that happens in the news
happens in our backyard in Dayton, the opioid epidemic, all these things.
And I like the idea of giving people choices, putting the money in their hands and giving
them the choices.
They will consider things that they don't even have the option to consider now.
And they can do things that aren't an option to do and that probably is the platform I
found incredibly exciting.
>> So there's so much to say in response to the argument made by Chappelle.
Again, I'm not interested in trashing him.
But I do think that we as Americans have been conditioned for such a long time to just be
happy with the crumbs that were given, that we think that we have to choose between putting
food on the table for our children or having a healthcare system that isn't broken.
We live in one of the richest countries in the world.
We work incredibly hard, we're more productive every year and we get less in return every
year.
And so I think that this false choice that's being presented there, it's wrong.
And even if you do have that false choice, right, if you do have to choose between $12,000
a year, he's referring to Andrew Yang's universal basic income proposal or healthcare.
Look, healthcare is, I mean, the system is so broken that almost every single American
with the exception of those at the very top of the economic ladder has suffered the consequences
of this broken healthcare system.
And so just to give you a few statistics real quick, half a million Americans go bankrupt
every single year from medical bills.
Half a million Americans, in the richest country in the world.
A study from the Harvard School of Medicine says that 45,000 people die every year due
to a lack of health insurance, and therefore a lack of access to ongoing medical care for
a wide variety of treatable conditions.
Also, the study conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance found
that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40% higher risk of death than their privately
insured counterparts, up from a 25% excess death rate found in 1993.
So it actually gets worse every year, every decade.
And we shouldn't be given this false choice.
I don't have a problem with universal basic income.
I do have a problem with turning to that as the problem solver for everything.
It's not going to significantly improve the quality of American's lives.
Is it gonna help?
Yes, absolutely, but I think that we need more comprehensive approach.
And the way that Andrew Yang's policy is being proposed is not comprehensive enough to address
all of the things that Americans are really struggling with.
So that's where I stand on it.
>> Yeah, I have a few issues with it.
I mean the starting point that Dave Chappelle seems to have is concern for people, and I
admire that.
I disagree with some of where he goes from there.
But fundamentally, he does care about people and he's supporting a candidate that he thinks
is going to make the situation better for them.
I just, well, to your point, one of the best things about Andrew Yang running is that 50
times as many people know what universal basic income is-
>> True, yeah.
>> Before, but I hope that they don't come out of his candidacy thinking that all of
the things that Yang or his implementation of universal basic income, which is just one
way to do it.
It is not universal basic income, it's a form of universal basic income.
>> True, yes.
>> It does not have to be at the expense of these other things.
There's no reason why universal basic income couldn't be added on to single payer healthcare,
guaranteed employment, right to housing, all those sorts of things.
He has a philosophy that he has embedded UBI in, it's not the only way to do it.
And I also, first of all, it's not gonna be $12,000 a year.
You'll of course be taxed, you'll lose some money to that.
And then for some people, if you don't have a lot of healthcare costs, then you'll be
up financially from having the money instead.
But for a lot of people, that's barely gonna cut in to dealing with your heart attack or
god knows what medication.
And the thing is, that is why we shouldn't be having this conversation about one or the
other.
There is no reason why it has to be one or the other.
>> Absolutely, yeah.
>> And the thing is, I don't even know what to what extent the way that Dave is expressing
it is necessarily the way that Andrew Yang wants it to be talked about.
And it's not like he doesn't have a healthcare plan, he does.
It's just not previously what he'd talked about as Medicare For All, he's not interested
in that anymore.
>> Right, it's not as robust as what Bernie Sanders is proposing.
And by the way, at this point, it's 100% confirmed.
In a recent interview with NPR, Elizabeth Warren made it clear that she is in favor
of a public option, as opposed to Medicare For All.
I'm just saying that because when we say that Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for Medicare
For All, he genuinely is.
Now Yang, look I think that universal basic income is a great proposal.
And I think that Yang, as a candidate, has been fascinating, he's brought important issues
to the table.
I think that he's made the democratic primaries a lot more interesting and my hope is that
candidates learn from one another, right?
And so I think that universal basic income can be super helpful in a robust systemic
change where you address all the other issues including housing, including healthcare.
And you're right, we don't know if Andrew Yang is in favor of the type of messaging
that was portrayed in that Chappelle video.
But what I do know is that we as Americans, as average Americans, people in the working
class and the middle class, we need to fight back and push back against this narrative
where people expect us to be happy with a little bit of change or maybe changing policy
when it comes to one area.
No, we produce a lot in this country and there's a lot of wealth in this country.
The problem is that the system makes it so it's not distributed properly.
And so that's what I think we need to address and it needs to be a systemic change, not
one policy or the other.
>> Yeah, and yeah, I know they're obviously they're not enemies, Sanders and Yang.
>> Right.
>> Yang was just talking about potentially his supporters maybe supporting Bernie in
Iowa if he doesn't reach the threshold, which it looks like at this point he won't.
There is some ideological overlap and they are similar on some issues, but obviously
their approach to governance, their political philosophy, is very different.
I don't want to oversimplify anything.
And I've made clear where my allegiance lies.
Obviously, I've already endorsed Bernie Sanders.
So take everything I say about other candidates with a grain of salt, but that's what
I think.