We Can Turn Our Legislative Incentives Towards Our Needs | Andrew Yang for President

My question is, how do you propose to deal with K Street? How do you propose to deal with large corporate interests in our politics and how the tail has been wagging the dog for decades because of K Street, because of lobbying, and because of large corporate money owning our politics? How do you diffuse that as just one branch of our government? It's a massive problem how money has completely overrun our politics. And as a relatively recently minted politician, I will share with you my least favorite thing to do. My least favorite thing to do is call rich people and ask them for money. It's soul crushing. Thanks to the Yang Gang, I don't need to do it anymore. Thank goodness, because I was terrible at it anyway. So the problem for our politicians is that if they get the people behind them, they then have to go somewhere else to get the money behind them. And so who has the money? It's the rich companies. It's rich individuals who are often affiliated with rich companies. So how do we fix it? How do we actually reclaim our government from these moneyed interests? And I'll tell you the plan. The plan is this. After I'm president in 2021, thank you, New Hampshire, we pass the Democracy Dollars Act, which puts $100 a year into every American citizen's hands that you can only give to political candidates or campaigns. It's use it or lose it. If you don't use it, it just disappears. You get another $100 the next year. I've done the math. And this would wash out lobbyist money by a factor of five. And then if I'm a legislator and I get 1,000 of you on board, that means I get $100,000. And then if the company says, hey, I've got $10,000 for you, I can say, I don't care about your $10,000. I'm actually going to focus on the people that got me elected. We can turn our entire legislative incentives towards our needs and the needs of the people. And a related point, how do you stop the revolving door between our government and industry? This is another sad truth. If you work in Washington, DC at a regulatory agency, you'll get paid $80,000, $90,000, $100,000. And as soon as you sit down, someone in industry is like, hey, we're going to pay you five to 10 times as much after you leave. So then your incentives are not to go hard on that company because your job doesn't last forever. And you're like, hey. I went to Phillips Exeter with a friend of mine, worked on Capitol Hill. And he swore up and down he would never be a lobbyist. Guess what he is today? A lobbyist. And when he told me he was sheepish, he was like, oh, this company is not so bad. And I was like, no, don't worry, man. I get it. Because the system has subverted even well-intended people who head to Washington. So how do we fix that? The way we fix that is we make a deal with regulators. We say, guess what? Great news. We're going to give you a big raise. Instead of getting paid $80,000, $90,000, we're going to pay you $250,000. We're going to pay you several times more. But you cannot go back to industry for 12 years after you leave your post, thus making you completely valueless to these companies. Because no one's going to wait 12 years. It's a one-way street. You know who recommended this plan? A woman named Sheila Bair, who was the FDIC regulator. And she said, it is messed up. How as soon as I got here, my incentives were just to go easy on the bank so they could pay me. She saw all of her colleagues doing that. So she said, what we should do, make it a one-way street, give regulators a raise, and make it so that they work for the people. So that is the plan. And I would start at the top. My plan as president is to have Congress pass a law that makes it illegal for former presidents to give speeches for money. Because it is human nature. If you're the president of the United States and you're hanging out with CEOs, you're like, wait a minute, this person's business is going to pay me $250,000 for an hour's worth of work in two years. So my incentives are just to go easy on you. We're all buddies. Let's not rock the boat too much. And that just happens over and over again and nothing changes. So the plan is to say, look, presidents have to work for the people, one-way street, no giving speeches for personal gain afterwards. And we'll fatten up your retirement, we'll make sure you live well, but you have to work for us. So this is the way we clean up the incentives, but it starts with democracy dollars. And that plan was approved by Lawrence Lessig. And if you really want someone who, you can tell, I have zero corporate interests backing me. I do not care about, like in these companies, I'm gonna do the hard work, gonna make some friends, hopefully you all, some enemies, who cares, and just try and clear the decks. But it's very, very hard for someone to rise to power today without, unfortunately, getting lots of gobs of corporate money. I believe I'm something of an anomaly on this one.