Andrew Yang

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang

 

Andrew Yang
Yang in 2019
Born	January 13, 1975 (age 45) Schenectady, New York, U.S.
Education	Brown University (AB) Columbia University (JD)
Occupation	Entrepreneur attorney political commentator
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Evelyn Yang ​ (m. 2011)​
Children	2 sons
Awards	Champions of Change (2012) Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship (2015) Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Public Service (2021)
Website	movehumanityforward.com
Signature

Andrew Yang
Traditional Chinese	楊安澤
Simplified Chinese	杨安泽

Andrew M. Yang (born January 13, 1975) is an American entrepreneur and former presidential candidate. Originally a corporate lawyer, Yang began working in startups and early stage growth companies as a founder or executive from 2000 to 2009. In 2011, he founded Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit organization focused on creating jobs in cities struggling to recover from the Great Recession. He then ran as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

The son of immigrants from Taiwan, Yang was raised in New York. He attended Brown University and then Columbia Law School. Dissatisfied with his work as an attorney, Yang began working for startups during the dot-com bubble before spending a decade as an executive at test preparation company Manhattan Prep. In 2011, Yang founded VFA, which recruits top college graduates into a two-year fellowship program at startups in developing cities across the United States. The Obama administration selected him in 2011 as a "Champion of Change" and in 2015 as a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship." Yang left VFA in 2017 to focus on his presidential campaign. In 2018, he authored The War on Normal People, which outlines several of his campaign's central ideas.

On November 6, 2017, Yang filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for President of the United States in the 2020 election. Yang's campaign largely focused on responding to the rapid development of automation, which is increasingly leading to workforce challenges and economic instability in the United States. His signature policy is the "Freedom Dividend," a universal basic income (UBI) of $1,000 a month to every American adult, a response to job displacement by automation, one of the primary factors that he claims led to Donald Trump's election in 2016. Considered a dark horse candidate throughout much of the primary, Yang received significant popularity online, with The New York Times calling him "The Internet's Favorite Candidate." News outlets described Yang as the most surprising candidate of the 2020 election cycle, going from a relative unknown to a major competitor in the race. Yang qualified for and participated in seven of the first eight Democratic debates, and has been credited^[6] with elevating discussions on UBI, automation, and autism to the national level, as well as for engaging Asian Americans in presidential politics.

Yang's campaign was noted for its happy-go-lucky and "tech-friendly" nature. His supporters, informally known as the "Yang Gang", included several high-profile celebrity endorsements and were noted for their ideological and political diversity. Yang suspended his campaign on February 11, 2020, shortly after the New Hampshire primary, pledging that he and his movement are "just getting started." On February 19, Yang joined CNN as a political commentator. On March 5, Yang announced the creation of the nonprofit organization Humanity Forward, dedicated to promoting the ideas he campaigned on during his run.

Early life and education

Yang was born on January 13, 1975, in Schenectady, New York. His parents emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. in the 1960s, and met while they were both in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. His father graduated with a PhD in physics and worked in the research labs of IBM and General Electric, generating over fifty patents in his career. His mother graduated with a master's degree in statistics before becoming a systems administrator at a local university, and later an artist. Yang has an older brother, Lawrence, who is a psychology professor at New York University. Yang's father, uncle, and cousin also became professors.

Yang grew up in Westchester County, New York, first in Somers, then in Katonah. Yang was one of the few children of East-Asian descent in his hometown, and he later described being bullied and called racial slurs by classmates while attending public school, in part because he was one of the smaller kids in his class after skipping a grade. In The War on Normal People (2018), he wrote, "Perhaps as a result, I've always taken pride in relating to the underdog or little guy or gal." When Yang was 12 years old, he scored a 1220 out of 1600 on the SAT, qualifying him to attend the Center for Talented Youth—a summer program for gifted kids run by Johns Hopkins University—which he attended for the next five summers. Yang later attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire. 

Yang has claimed that he was part of the 1992 U.S. national debate team and competed at the world championships in London. Yang graduated from Exeter in 1992. He enrolled at Brown University, where he majored in economics and political science, and graduated in 1996. He then attended Columbia Law School, earning a Juris Doctor in 1999.

Career

Early career

After graduating from law school, Yang began his career as a corporate attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City. He quickly grew dissatisfied with the work, finding it grueling and unfulfilling. Yang later described the job as "a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie." He began to desire a career where he would get to "build something." He left the law firm after five months, which he has called "the five worst months of my life."

In February 2000 Yang joined his office mate, Jonathan Philips, in launching Stargiving, a website for celebrity-affiliated philanthropic fundraising. The startup had some initial success, but folded in 2002 as the dot-com bubble burst. Yang became involved in other ventures, including a party-organizing business. From 2002 to 2005, he served as the vice president of a healthcare startup.

Manhattan Prep

After working in the healthcare industry for four years, Yang left MMF Systems to join his friend Zeke Vanderhoek at a small test preparation company, Manhattan Prep. In an appearance on the podcast Freakonomics, Yang said he "personally taught the analyst classes at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley" during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2006, Vanderhoek asked Yang to take over as CEO. While Yang was CEO, the company primarily provided GMAT test preparation. It expanded from five to 69 locations and was acquired by Kaplan, Inc. in December 2009. Yang resigned as the company's president in early 2012. Yang later said it was during his time at Manhattan Prep that he became a millionaire.

In September 2019 testimony before the New York City Commission on Gender Equity, former employee Kimberly Watkins testified that Yang had fired her because he felt that she would not work as hard after getting married. Yang has denied the allegations, saying, "Kimberly Watkins' facts about her break from Manhattan Prep are inaccurate. During my more than a decade as CEO, I have worked with many women, married and otherwise, and value their work and dedication as important to the success of any institution." In an appearance on The View, Yang said, "I've had so many phenomenal women leaders that have elevated me and my organizations at every phase of my career, and if I was that kind of person I would never have had any success."

In November, a former employee of Yang's at Manhattan GMAT filed a lawsuit against him for allegedly paying her less than her male co-workers and subsequently firing her for asking for a raise. Yang and another female employee at the company disputed the anonymous woman's claim that she was in an equivalent position to the male co-workers she cited.

Venture for America

Following Kaplan's acquisition of Manhattan Prep in late 2009, Yang began to work on creating a new nonprofit fellowship program, Venture for America (VFA), which he founded in 2011 with the mission "to create economic opportunity in American cities by mobilizing the next generation of entrepreneurs and equipping them with the skills and resources they need to create jobs." VFA was launched with $200,000 and trained 40 graduates in 2012 and 69 in 2013, sending them to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Providence. VFA added Columbus, Miami, San Antonio and St. Louis in 2014, with a class of 106.

Yang speaks about entrepreneurship at the 2015 Techonomy Conference in Detroit, Michigan.

VFA's strategy was to recruit the nation's top college graduates into a two-year fellowship program in which they would work for and apprentice at promising startups in developing cities across the United States. Yang's book Smart People Should Build Things (2014) argues that the top universities in the country cherry-pick the smartest kids out of small towns and funnel them into the same corporate jobs in the same big cities. VFA's goal is to help distribute that talent around the country and incentivize entrepreneurship for economic growth.

After 2011 VFA grew, reaching a $6 million annual operating budget in 2017, and operating in about 20 U.S. cities, adding Kansas City, Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Charlotte, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and St. Louis. VFA began running a "startup accelerator" in Detroit and launched a seed fund and an investment fund for fellows.

VFA quickly received national attention, including from the Obama administration. In 2011, Yang was selected as a "Champion of Change, a program "[recognizing] ordinary Americans across the country who are doing extraordinary work in their communities. In 2015, Yang was recognized as a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.

In 2014, Yang published Smart People Should Build Things, which emphasized the importance of intelligent people becoming entrepreneurs and engaging in the startup economy, rather than pursuing more traditional careers. Generation Startup, a documentary film about six startups in Detroit launched through the VFA program, was released in 2016. It was co-directed by Cynthia Wade and Cheryl Miller Houser.

In March 2017, Yang stepped down from his position as CEO of VFA, but continued to advise startups aligned to his signature policy of universal basic income throughout his presidential campaign.

Humanity Forward

On March 5, 2020, following the suspension of his presidential campaign, Yang announced that he was creating the nonprofit organization Humanity Forward, dedicated to promoting the ideas he campaigned on during his run, such as UBI and data privacy. Humanity Forward will also seek to engage and activate new voters while supporting like-minded down-ballot candidates, following the model of the pro-Bernie Sanders 501(c)4 Our Revolution. Yang also announced that the organization would give away $500,000 in UBI to the residents of Hudson, New York to demonstrate UBI's benefits.

In mid-March, several prominent Democrats and Republicans advocated for basic income in response to the coronavirus pandemic. After the Trump administration said it was considering a form of basic income in response to the pandemic, Yang announced that he had been in touch with the White House and had offered his team's services. On March 20, CNN reported that Humanity Forward would soon spend $1 million on $1,000 monthly payments to 500 low-income households in the Bronx during the crisis. Yang tweeted that the number of households was expected to double with additional funding. On August 3, Yang announced that his organization was partnering with The $1K Project, an online network which helps to identify families in need, who will be awarded three months of $1,000 payments. One of the network's founders describes the program as "a bridge to reemployment or other kinds of support."

Net worth

Media outlets have provided several estimates of Yang's net worth: $1 million according to Forbes, between $834,000 and $2.4 million according to The Wall Street Journal, and between $3 million and $4 million according to Newsweek.

2020 presidential campaign

Overview

Yang makes a speech in New Hampshire in January 2019. His book, The War on Normal People, is displayed.

On November 6, 2017, Yang filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for President of the United States in 2020. The campaign began with a small initial staff working out of an apartment owned by Yang's mother. He ran on multiple slogans, including "Humanity First", "Make America Think Harder (MATH)", and "Not Left, Not Right, Forward." Initially considered a longshot, Yang's campaign gained significant momentum in February 2019 following an appearance on the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. He has since appeared on numerous other podcasts and shows, including The Breakfast Club, The Ben Shapiro Show, and Real Time with Bill Maher. By March 2019, Yang had met the polling and fundraising thresholds to qualify for the first round of Democratic primary debates. In August 2019, he met the higher thresholds to qualify for the second round of Democratic debates. Later, he also qualified for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Democratic debates. Yang was unable to qualify for the January 2020 debate due to not having met a polling threshold in enough DNC Certified national polls. He did qualify for the February 2020 debate.

Yang's campaign focused largely on policy, in what Reuters described as a "technocratic approach." Yang regularly called Donald Trump a symptom of a wider problem in the economy, rather than the problem itself. According to The New York Times, Yang was known for doing interviews with conservative news outlets, and "although [Yang] tweets often, he almost never tweets about Mr. Trump." This approach was exemplified by one of Yang's campaign slogans: "Not Left, Not Right, Forward." According to a July 2019 YouGov poll, Yang was one of two 2020 Democratic candidates, along with Senator Bernie Sanders, with double-digit support among voters who voted for Trump in 2016. Polling conducted by Business Insider in the fall of 2019 found that Yang had the highest net satisfaction rate among undecided 2020 general election voters, and a November 2019 College Pulse poll found that Yang had the highest crossover support among college students of any candidate in the 2020 race, with 18% of Republican college students saying they would support Yang over Trump in the general election.

Yang speaks with attendees at the 2019 Iowa Democratic Wing Ding at Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.

Yang's campaign was known for its heavy reliance on Internet-based campaigning. The campaign was also known for its popularity online, with The New York Times calling Yang "The Internet's Favorite Candidate." His campaign supporters, known informally as the Yang Gang, brought attention to his campaign on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms, through memes and viral campaigning. Several news outlets called Yang the most surprising candidate of the election cycle, going from relative obscurity to a national contender who outlasted several well-known politicians.

Yang is at least the third American of East Asian descent to run for President of the United States, after Hiram Fong and Patsy Mink. According to BBC, he "is one of the first and most recognizable East Asian-Americans in history to run for president." He has said that he hopes his "campaign can inspire Asian Americans to be engaged in [politics]."

Yang dropped out of the presidential race on February 11, 2020. On March 10, 2020, Yang endorsed Joe Biden.

Fundraising

Yang speaks with attendees at a fundraiser hosted by the Iowa Asian and Latino Coalition at Jasper Winery in Des Moines, Iowa.

On March 11, 2019, Yang announced that he surpassed the fundraising threshold of 65,000 donors, qualifying him to participate in the first round of Democratic primary debates. On June 28, he announced that he reached 130,000 donors, which met the fundraising criterion for the third round of debates.

In the first quarter of 2019, Yang raised $1.7 million, of which more than $250,000 came from "the last four days of the quarter." According to Yang's campaign, "the average donation was $17.92" and "99% of the donations were less than $200." In the second quarter, Yang raised $2.8 million. The campaign stated that 99.6% "of its donors were small-dollar donors [who] gave less than $200." On August 13, 2019, Yang's third-quarter fundraising reached $2.8 million, matching his total second-quarter fundraising. On August 15, he reached 200,000 unique donors. On August 17, Yang announced that among his campaign donors, "the most common jobs are software engineers, teachers, drivers, retail workers and warehouse workers" and the "biggest employer is the US Army." On September 1, he announced that the average donation was $25, and that the campaign had received no corporate political action committee (PAC) money. In the 72 hours after the third debate, Yang's campaign raised $1 million, suggesting that it "is on track to raise significantly more in the third quarter" than in the second quarter, according to Politico.

In the third quarter, Yang's campaign raised $10 million, representing a 257% quarterly increase—the largest growth rate among the fundraising numbers of all candidates. The average donation was around $30, and 99% of the donations were $200 or less.

In the fourth quarter, Yang's campaign raised $16.5 million. During his entire 2020 campaign, he received donations from about 400,000 unique donors, with 75% of donations coming from "small dollar" donors who gave $200 or less.

Supporters and media coverage

Yang's supporters form a crowd at the Liberty and Justice Celebration in Des Moines, Iowa. Yang is visible in the background.

On multiple occasions, Yang's campaign and supporters have criticized media outlets, such as MSNBC and CNN, for their coverage of Yang. Incidents include cases of news outlets excluding Yang from lists of 2020 Democratic candidates. On August 29, 2019, Yang supporters prompted the hashtag #YangMediaBlackout to trend on Twitter after a CNN infographic displaying the results of a poll included candidate Beto O'Rourke but not Yang, even though the poll showed Yang polling three times higher than O'Rourke. Yang supporters also criticized media outlets for providing disproportionately low coverage of Yang, pointing out that according to The New York Times, Yang has received some of the least coverage in cable news among the candidates, even though he was polling better than most of the field.

In early September, Yang's lack of media coverage was reported by several media outlets, including CNN. Axios noted that while Yang polled in the top six of the Democratic primary and was "getting plenty of online attention", he was "being treated by the media like a bottom-tier candidate." Krystal Ball of The Hill observed that there was "a persistent pattern of ignoring Yang's candidacy" among media outlets such as CNN. She further noted that Scott Santens, one of Yang's supporters, "has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter." On October 23, 2019, Santens released an article compiling the mainstream media's exclusions of Yang. In November 2019, Yang's campaign manager dismissed an apology by MSNBC for leaving Yang off an infographic, which according to Santens's compilation was the 15th time in the campaign cycle MSNBC or its related networks had wrongfully excluded Yang. On November 23, 2019, following the MSNBC-hosted November debate in which Yang received the least speaking time and was not called upon for the first 30 minutes of the two-hour debate, Yang publicly rejected a request to appear on MSNBC unless the network would "apologize on air, discuss and include our campaign consistent with our polling, and allow surrogates from our campaign as they do other candidates'". A Business Insider analysis found that Yang received significantly less speaking time at debates than would be expected given his polling numbers. In late December 2019, Yang ended his boycott of MSNBC, saying he preferred to "speak to as many Americans as possible."

End of campaign

Yang dropped out of the race on February 11, 2020, after a disappointing result in the New Hampshire primary. He announced to his supporters, "while we did not win this election, we are just getting started." Howard Wolfson suggested that he "would make a very interesting candidate" for the mayor of New York City; Yang said, "it's incredibly flattering to be thought of in that role.... We haven't ruled anything out at this point. I will say I'm more attracted to executive roles than legislative ones because I think you can get more done." On March 3, Yang reiterated his interest in the mayorship to BuzzFeed News.

On February 19, Yang joined CNN as a political commentator. On February 22, he said that "Someone needs to pull an Andrew Yang" and drop out of the race, referring to Bernie Sanders' emergence as the front-runner and the remaining candidates competing to position themselves against him. In late February, it was reported that Michael Bloomberg's campaign had reached out to Yang concerning an endorsement. Yang said on CNN that "multiple campaigns have reached out, and it's flattering to be considered for a VP role or any role in someone's campaign," but said that he would be "much more enthusiastic about considering an endorsement" if a candidate made a commitment to the issues he had run on, including job automation and UBI.

On March 5, Yang announced his involvement with the nonprofit organization Humanity Forward. On March 10, the night of the Michigan Democratic primary, he endorsed Joe Biden. He said he understood Sanders supporters' frustration, but that beating Trump in the election was the most important objective. The same day, CNN accidentally called Yang the "Democratic presidential nominee" in a tweet.

Yang hosts a podcast, Yang Speaks, where he discusses national and global issues with guest commentators.

Yang has said that he is interested in running for mayor of New York City in 2021.

On April 29, 2020, Yang announced that he was taking legal action against the New York State Board of Elections after the state election commission voted to cancel its presidential primary. The filing stated: "This unprecedented and unwarranted move infringes the rights of Plaintiffs and all New York State Democratic Party voters, of which there are estimated to be more than six million, as it fundamentally denies them the right to choose our next candidate for the office of President of the United States." In early May, the judge ruled in Yang's favor.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yang, through his organization Humanity Forward, launched The All Americans Movement, which works to help communities affected by racism related to the pandemic.

Initially left out of the list of confirmed speakers for the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Yang expressed his dissatisfaction on Twitter stating that he "kind of expected to speak" at the event. Yang's supporters urged the DNC to include him in the speaker lineup, and on August 13, Yang was added to the list. Yang spoke at the DNC on August 20, as the third speaker of the night.

In September 2020, Yang was hired by the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign as a member of the campaign's small business advisory council.

Political positions

Yang speaks with attendees at the Presidential Gun Sense Forum hosted by Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa.

Many of Yang's political views are based around an idea he has called "Human-Centered Capitalism." In April 2018, he published The War on Normal People, which focused largely on his domestic policies. On Yang's campaign website, more than 160 policies are listed. Central to his 2020 campaign was the proposal of a monthly $1,000 "Freedom Dividend" to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 (a form of universal basic income, or UBI) in response to worker displacement driven by technological automation. According to Yang, the Freedom Dividend's benefits include "healthier people, less stressed-out people, better-educated people, stronger communities, more volunteerism, [and] more civic participation. There's zero bureaucracy associated with it [because there is no] need to verify whether [people's] circumstances change." Citing forecasting by the Roosevelt Institute, Yang has said that the dividend "would create up to 2 million new jobs in [American] communities." However, the policies the Roosevelt Institute studied differ from Yang's Freedom Dividend in some significant ways. Yang has said that the dividend would be opt-in. For those receiving welfare benefits, opting in to the dividend would replace some benefits while stacking with others.^[160] Yang has said that he became a UBI advocate after reading American futurist Martin Ford's book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which deals with the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the job market and economy. He believes UBI is a more viable policy than job retraining programs, citing studies showing that job retraining of displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest had success rates of 0–15%.

Yang has proposed a value-added tax to finance the dividend and to combat tax avoidance by large American corporations. He argues that automation-driven job displacement was the main reason Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, saying that based on data, "There's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in a community and the movement towards Donald Trump." Yang's campaign slogan "Humanity First" called attention to his belief that automation of many key industries is one of the biggest threats facing the American workforce. On healthcare, he has said that while he supports "the spirit of Medicare for All", he "would keep the option of private insurance", with the ultimate goal to "demonstrate to the American people that private insurance is not what [they] need" and that Medicare for All is "superior to [their] current insurance." But his 2020 policy proposal did not commit to Medicare for All or contain a public option, focusing instead on reducing costs and eventually expanding coverage.

Yang speaking with the media at the 2019 Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa

Yang supports the implementation of "democracy dollars": $100 every year, "use it or lose it", for citizens to give to candidates. The policy aims to drown out corporate money resulting from political lobbying and Citizens United v. FEC. He supports ending partisan gerrymandering, ranked-choice voting, and lowering the national voting age to 16. Yang supports legalizing cannabis and decriminalizing opioids (including heroin) for personal use, but does not support legalizing or decriminalizing cocaine. He has cited Portugal's drug policy, which he believes to be similar, as evidence of the effectiveness of his policy. Yang has also advocated for all Police Officers to be trained in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, at least to the rank of purple belt. Yang supports a carbon tax and bringing the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as investing in thorium-based nuclear power. He supports legislation banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and has pledged to appoint pro-choice judges. Yang has proposed creating a department focused on regulating the addictive nature of media, appointing a White House psychologist, making Election Day a national holiday, and, to stem corruption, increasing the salaries of federal regulators but limiting their private work after they leave public service. He supports legalizing online poker in all 50 states, the "first legitimate candidate" to do so according to Card Player.

Yang makes a speech at "Youth Voice: The Iowa Caucus", a presidential candidate forum hosted in September 2019 at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

Yang has said that Israel "is a very, very important ally." In regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Yang wants a "two-state solution that allows both the Israeli and Palestinian people to have sovereign land and self-determination." He has called Iran a "destabilizing force in the region", but supported Obama's Iran nuclear deal. Yang has criticized China's treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority and China's "more aggressive stance throughout the region, whether towards Hong Kong, Taiwan, or in the South China Sea." He also voiced support for the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests. At the same time, Yang has warned against entering a "New Cold War" with China and stated: "We're not going to be able to address global threats like climate change and even collaborate on artificial intelligence if we don't have a certain level of cooperation between the US and China."

Yang has opposed U.S. military support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen and has backed a more aggressive policy toward Russia, saying, "Russia is our biggest geopolitical threat, because they've been hacking our democracy successfully." Yang wrote to the Council on Foreign Relations: "Russian aggression is a destabilizing force, and we must work with our allies to project a strong and unified face against Russian expansionism. [...] we need to expand sanctions against Russia, and Putin and members of his government specifically through the Global Magnitsky Act, in order to pressure the country to play by international rules." Yang has said that the U.S. has tampered with foreign elections—just like Russia has—and that Russian interference "has to stop, and if it does not stop we will take this as an act of hostility against the American people."

Yang meeting with President Obama at the White House in 2012

Recognition

In 2012, Yang was named a "Champion of Change" by the Obama administration. In 2015, he was named a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship." In 2020, Yang received the 2021 Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Public Service, awarded by the Vilcek Foundation. Jan Vilcek, Chairman and CEO of the Vilcek Foundation, said, "The Vilcek Prize for Excellence... is a way for us to honor the work of individuals... whose experience and career contributions nonetheless exemplify or speak to our foundation’s core mission and vision—to celebrate the multitude of immigrant experiences and how immigration enriches culture, society, and innovation in the United States.”

Personal life

Yang's wife, Evelyn Yang, speaking at an event during his presidential campaign

Andrew Yang has been married to Evelyn Yang (née Lu) since 2011, and they have two sons. Yang has spoken about his older son who has autism, saying, "I'm very proud of my son and anyone who has someone on the spectrum in their family feels the exact same way."

Yang attends the Reformed Church of New Paltz with his family and has identified Mark E. Mast as their pastor. He considers himself spiritual. When speaking about his faith in an interfaith town hall at Wartburg College, Yang said he "wouldn't be the first to say that [his] own journey is still in progress."

In an interview with The Hill, Yang said that Theodore Roosevelt is his favorite president and that he is the godfather of Roosevelt's great-granddaughter.

Publications

Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America. HarperCollins. February 4, 2014. ISBN 978-0062292049.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Hachette Books. April 3, 2018. ISBN 978-0316414241.

Basic income in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_in_the_United_States 

Basic income and negative income tax, which is a related welfare system, has been debated in the United States since the 1960s, and to a smaller extent also before that. During the 1960s and 1970s a number of experiments with negative income tax were conducted in United States and Canada. In the 1970s another and somewhat related welfare system was introduced instead, the Earned Income Tax Credit. The next big development in the history of basic income in the United States came in 1982, when the Alaska Permanent Fund was established. It has delivered some kind of basic income, financed from the state's oil and gas revenues, ever since.

Older history (from Paine and Spence to 1900)

Arguably the first to propose a system with great similarities to a national basic income in the United States was Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice, 1796/1797. His idea was that a few "basic incomes" to young people, in their 20s, financed by tax on heritage, was highly needed and also a matter of justice. Shortly after that, in 1797, Thomas Spence outlined a complete basic income proposal.

1900-1960

In the first half of the 20th century various people in the United States advocated some kind of basic income. There were for example the Louisiana governor Huey Long who called it "Share Our Wealth" and also some followers of Henry George.

1960s and 1970s

In the 1960s and the 1970s the debate around, and support for, basic income and the related system negative income tax, rose substantially. This debate and interest was highly linked to general debate on poverty and how to deal with it. In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements. Milton Friedman endorsed the negative income tax in 1962 and again in 1980, and he connected his support for the negative income tax to support for basic income in an interview with Eduardo Suplicy in 2000.

Martin Luther King, a famous civil rights activist and politician, also gave his support for the idea in his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, published in 1967. In 1969, Richard Nixon proposed a "Family Assistance Program" which resembled guaranteed income, in that benefits did not rapidly taper with additional earnings by the beneficiaries. Nixon's proposal only applied to families, but extended previous welfare by benefiting more than those without a 'father'. Other advocates from the 1960s and 1970s include Senator George McGovern who called for a 'demogrant' that was similar to a basic income.

From 1968 to 1982, the US and Canadian governments conducted a total of five negative income tax experiments. They were the first major social science experiments in the world. The first experiment was the New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment, proposed by MIT Economics graduate student Heather Ross in 1967 in a proposal to the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. The four experiments were in:

1. The New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment: Trenton, Passaic, Paterson, and Jersey City, New Jersey with Scranton, Pennsylvania added to increase the number of white families, 1968–1972 (1357 families)
2. The Rural Income Maintenance Experiment: Rural areas in Iowa and North Carolina, 1969–1973 (809 families)
3. Gary, Indiana, 1971–1974 (1800 families)
4. Seattle (SIME) and Denver (DIME), 1971–1982 (4800 families)
5. Manitoba, Canada ("Mincome"), 1974-1979

In general they found that workers would decrease labor supply (employment) by two to four weeks per year because of the guarantee of income equal to the poverty threshold.

The 1980s, 1990s and early 2000

The Permanent Fund of Alaska

1975 photo of Jay Hammond, the former governor of Alaska who is regarded as "the man behind" the foundation of the Permanent Fund of Alaska.

The Alaska Permanent Fund is often mentioned as one of the few existing basic income systems in the world. Since 1982, the Fund has paid a partial basic income to all (permanent) residents averaging approximately $1,600 annually per resident (adjusted to 2019 dollars) from the state's oil production revenues. A prominent figure in the history of the fund is Jay Hammond. He was the Republican governor of Alaska in the 1970s and as such he was concerned that the huge wealth generated by oil mining in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oilfield in North America, would only benefit the current population of the state. Therefore, he suggested setting up a fund to ensure that this wealth would be preserved, through investment of part of the revenue from oil.

2010-2018

The Green Party of the United States in its 2010 platform advocated for a universal basic income to "every adult regardless of health, employment, or marital status, in order to minimize government bureaucracy and intrusiveness into people's lives."

The debate about basic income, according to Guy Standing, has gone in two directions in the United States in recent years. On the one hand is the introduction of basic income as an alternative to existing social policies, paid from direct taxation, and on the other hand is a discussion about capital funds with basic income-style dividends.

In July 2017, Hawaii State Rep. Chris Lee published a bill to investigate basic income for his state.

American Democratic Politician John Moser ran on a Universal Citizens Dividend as the core focus of his 2018 Congressional campaign.

Andrew Yang and the emergency-basic income of 2020

Andrew Yang was a presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. He was running against more well-known candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to get the Democratic Party-ticket to run against the Republican candidate in 2020. His flagship proposal was a basic income, which he labels "Freedom Dividend" of 1000 dollar per month to each American citizen over the age of 18. He also had several other proposals, regarding democracy, health and medicine, international affairs and so on, but the focus is on the basic income. That, in turn, is a proposal which he outlines with the background of the fourth industrial revolution. In other words, the development with automation and artificial intelligence, and how these factors change the job market. According to Yang, the Freedom Dividend's benefits include "healthier people, less stressed-out people, better-educated people, stronger communities, more volunteerism, [and] more civic participation. There's zero bureaucracy associated with it [because there is no] need to verify whether [people's] circumstances change."

Yang argues that automation-driven job displacement was the main reason Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, saying that based on data, "There's a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in a community and the movement towards Donald Trump." Yang has said that he became a UBI advocate after reading American futurist Martin Ford's book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which deals with the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the job market and economy. He believes UBI is a more viable policy than job retraining programs, citing studies that job retraining of displaced manufacturing workers in the Midwest had success rates of 0–15%.

On March 5, 2020 Andrew Yang started the Humanity Forward movement, a non-profit with the goal of introducing the core ideas that Yang ran on during his 2020 presidential campaign such as Universal Basic Income, human-centered capitalism, and data as a property right. Andrew Yang has already received three million dollars in donations for use in this organization. Humanity Forward will endorse and provide resources to political candidates who champion Universal Basic Income, human-centered capitalism and similar policies. HF will help launch and support projects to display the power and practicality of UBI in real life. Yang intends to push these ideas to the mainstream through podcasts, traditional media, and high-impact events.

Welfare dependency

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Welfare dependency is the state in which a person or household is reliant on government welfare benefits for their income for a prolonged period of time, and without which they would not be able to meet the expenses of daily living. The United States Department of Health and Human Services defines welfare dependency as the proportion of all individuals in families which receive more than 50 percent of their total annual income from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and/or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Typically viewed as a social problem, it has been the subject of major welfare reform efforts since the mid-20th century, primarily focused on trying to make recipients self-sufficient through paid work. While the term "welfare dependency" can be used pejoratively, for the purposes of this article it shall be used to indicate a particular situation of persistent poverty.

Discourses of dependency and the history of a social problem

Terminology

The term "welfare dependency" is itself controversial, often carrying derogatory connotations or insinuations that the recipient is unwilling to work. Historian Michael B. Katz discussed the discourses surrounding poverty in his 1989 book The Undeserving Poor, where he elaborated upon the distinctions Americans make between so-called “deserving” recipients of aid, such as widows, and “undeserving” ones, like single-parent mothers, with the distinction being that the former have fallen upon hard times through no fault of their own whereas the latter are seen as having chosen to live on the public purse. Drawing this dichotomy diverts attention from the structural factors that cause and entrench poverty, such as economic change. Instead of focusing on how to tackle the root causes of poverty, people focus on attacking the supposed poor character of the recipient.

It is important to note that while the term “welfare dependence” in and of itself is politically neutral and merely describes a state of drawing benefits, in conventional usage it has taken on a very negative meaning that blames welfare recipients for social ills and insinuates they are morally deficient. In his 1995 book The War Against the Poor, Columbia University sociology professor Herbert Gans asserted that the label “welfare recipient,” when used to malign a poor person, transforms the individual’s experience of being in poverty into a personal failing while ignoring positive aspects of their character. For example, Gans writes, “That a welfare recipient may be a fine mother becomes irrelevant; the label assumes that she, like all others in her family, is a bad mother, and she is given no chance to prove otherwise.”  In this way, structural factors that cause a person to be reliant on benefit payments for the majority of his or her income are in essence ignored because the problem is seen as situated within the person, not society. To describe a person as welfare dependent can therefore be interpreted as "blaming the victim," depending on context.

The term "welfare-reliant," as used by Edin and Lein (1996), can describe the same concept with potentially fewer negative connotations.

Welfare, long-term reliance, and policy

There is a great deal of overlap between discourses of welfare dependency and the stereotype of the welfare queen, in that long-term welfare recipients are often seen as draining public resources they have done nothing to earn, as well as stereotyped as doing nothing to improve their situation, choosing to draw benefits when there are alternatives available. This contributes to stigmatization of welfare recipients. While the stereotype of a long-term welfare recipient involves not wanting to work, in reality a large proportion of welfare recipients are engaged in some form of paid work but still cannot make ends meet.

Attention was drawn to the issue of long-term reliance on welfare in the Moynihan Report. Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, urban Black Americans would still suffer disadvantage and remain entrenched in poverty due to the decay of the family structure. Moynihan wrote, “The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.” The relatively high proportion of Black families headed by single-parent mothers, along with the high proportion of children born out of wedlock, was seen as a pernicious social problem – one leading to long-term poverty and consequently reliance on welfare benefits for income, as there would be no male breadwinner working while the mother took care of her children.

From 1960 to 1975, both the percentage of families headed by single-parent mothers and reliance on welfare payments increased. At the same time, research began indicating that the majority of people living below the poverty line experienced only short spells of poverty, casting doubt on the notion of an entrenched underclass. For example, a worker who lost his job might be categorized as poor for a few months prior to re-entering full-time employment, and he or she would be much less likely to end up in a situation of long-term poverty than a single-parent mother with little formal education, even if both were considered “poor” for statistical purposes.

In 1983, researchers Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the duration of spells of poverty (defined as continuous periods spent with income under the poverty line), looking specifically at entry and exit. They found that while three in five people who were just beginning a spell of poverty came out of it within three years, only one-quarter of people who had already been poor for three years were able to exit poverty within the next two.  The probability that a person will be able to exit poverty declines as the spell lengthens. A small but significant group of recipients remained on welfare for much longer, forming the bulk of poverty at any one point in time and requiring the most in government resources. At any one time, if a cross-sectional sample of poor people in the United States was taken, about 60% would be in a spell of poverty that would last at least eight years. Interest thus arose in studying the determinants of long-term receipt of welfare. Bane & Ellwood found that only 37% of poor people in their sample became poor as a result of the head of household’s wages decreasing, and their average spell of poverty lasted less than four years. On the other hand, entry into poverty that was the result of a woman becoming head of household lasted on average for more than five years. Children born into poverty were particularly likely to remain poor.

Reform: the rise of workfare

In the popular imagination, welfare became seen as something that the poor had made into a lifestyle rather than a safety net. The federal government had been urging single-parent mothers with children to take on paid work in an effort to reduce welfare rolls since the introduction of the WIN Program in 1967, but in the 1980s this emphasis became central to welfare policy. Emphasis turned toward personal responsibility and the attainment of self-sufficiency through work.

Conservative views of welfare dependency, coming from the perspective of classical economics, argued that individual behaviors and the policies that reward them lead to the entrenchment of poverty. Lawrence M. Mead's 1986 book Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship argued that American welfare was too permissive, giving out benefit payments without demanding anything from poor people in return, particularly not requiring the recipient to work. Mead viewed this as directly linked to the higher incidence of social problems among poor Americans, more as a cause than an effect of poverty:

"[F]ederal programs have special difficulties in setting standards for their recipients. They seem to shield their clients from the threats and rewards that stem from private society – particularly the marketplace – while providing few sanctions of their own. The recipients seldom have to work or otherwise function to earn whatever income, service, or benefit a program gives; meager though it may be, they receive it essentially as an entitlement. Their place in American society is defined by their need and weakness, not their competence. This lack of accountability is among the reasons why nonwork, crime, family breakup, and other problems are much commoner among recipients than Americans generally."

Charles Murray argued that American social policy ignored people's inherent tendency to avoid hard work and be amoral, and that from the War on Poverty onward the government had given welfare recipients disincentives to work, marry, or have children in wedlock. His 1984 book Losing Ground was also highly influential in the welfare reforms of the 1990s.

In 1983, Bane & Ellwood found that one-third of single-parent mothers exited poverty through work, indicating that it was possible for employment to form a route out of reliance on welfare even for this particular group. Overall, four in five exits from poverty could be explained by an increase in earnings, according to their data. The idea of combining welfare reform with work programs in order to reduce long-term dependency received bipartisan support during the 1980s, culminating in the signing of the Family Support Act in 1988. This Act aimed to reduce the number of AFDC recipients, enforce child support payments, and establish a welfare-to-work program. One major component was the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program, which provided remedial education and was specifically targeted to teenage mothers and recipients who had been on welfare for six years or more – those populations considered most likely to be welfare dependent. JOBS was to be administered by the states, with federal government matching up to a capped level of funding. A lack of resources, particularly in relation to financing and case management, stymied JOBS. However, in 1990, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), first enacted in 1975, offered working poor families with children an incentive to remain in work. Also in that year, federal legislation aimed at providing child care to families who would otherwise be dependent on welfare aided single-parent mothers in particular.

Welfare reform during the Clinton presidency placed time limits on benefit receipt, replacing Aid for Families with Dependent Children and the JOBS program with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and requiring that recipients begin to work after two years of receiving these payments. Such measures were intended to decrease welfare dependence: The House Ways and Means Committee stated that the goal of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was to "reduce the length of welfare spells by attacking dependency while simultaneously preserving the function of welfare as a safety net for families experiencing temporary financial problems." This was a direct continuation of the line of thinking that had been prevalent in the 1980s, where personal responsibility was emphasized. TANF was administered by individual states, with funding coming from federal block grants. However, resources were not adjusted for inflation, caseload changes, or state spending changes. Unlike its predecessor AFDC, TANF had as its explicit goal the formation and maintenance of two-parent families and the prevention of out-of-wedlock births, reflecting the discourses that had come to surround long-term welfare receipt.

One shortcoming of workfare-based reform was that it did not take into account the fact that, due to welfare benefits often not paying enough to meet basic needs, a significant proportion of mothers on welfare already worked "off the books" to generate extra income without losing their welfare entitlements. Neither welfare nor work alone could provide enough money for daily expenses; only by combining the two could the recipients provide for themselves and their children. Even though working could make a woman eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, the amount was not enough to make up for the rest of her withdrawn welfare benefits. Work also brought with it related costs, such as transportation and child care. Without fundamental changes in the skill profile of the average single-parent mother on welfare to address structural changes in the economy, or a significant increase in pay for low-skilled work, withdrawing welfare benefits and leaving women with only work income meant that many faced a decline in overall income. Sociologists Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed mothers on welfare in Chicago, Charleston, Boston, and San Antonio, and found that while working mothers generally had more income left over after paying rent and food than welfare mothers did, the former were still worse-off financially because of the costs associated with work. Despite strong support for the idea that work will provide the income and opportunity to help people become self-sufficient, this approach has not alleviated the need for welfare payments in the first place: In 2005, approximately 52% of TANF recipients lived in a family with at least one working adult.

Measuring dependency

The United States Department of Health and Human Services defines ten indicators of welfare dependency:

• Indicator 1: Degree of Dependence, which can be measured by the percentage of total income from means-tested benefits. If greater than 50%, the recipient of welfare is considered to be dependent on it for the purposes of official statistics.
• Indicator 2: Receipt of Means-Tested Assistance and Labor Force Attachment, or what percentage of recipients are in families with different degrees of labor force participation.
• Indicator 3: Rates of Receipt of Means-Tested Assistance, or the percentage of the population receiving TANF, food stamps, and SSI.
• Indicator 4: Rates of Participation in Means-Tested Assistance Programs, or the percentage of people eligible for welfare benefits who are actually claiming them.
• Indicator 5: Multiple Program Receipt, or the percentage of recipients who are receiving at least two of TANF, food stamps, or SSI.
• Indicator 6: Dependence Transitions, which breaks down recipients by demographic characteristics and the level of income that welfare benefits represented for them in previous years.
• Indicator 7: Program Spell Duration, or for how long recipients draw the three means-tested benefits.
• Indicator 8: Welfare Spell Duration with No Labor Force Attachment, which measures how long recipients with no one working in their family remain on welfare.
• Indicator 9: Long Term Receipt, which breaks down spells on TANF by how long a person has been in receipt.
• Indicator 10: Events Associated with the Beginning and Ending of Program Spells, such as an increase in personal or household income, marriage, children no longer being eligible for a benefit, and/or transfer onto other benefits.

In 2005, the Department estimated that 3.8% of the American population could be considered dependent on welfare, calculated as having more than half of their family’s income coming from TANF, food stamps, and/or SSDI payments, down from 5.2% in 1996. As 15.3% of the population was in receipt of welfare benefits in 2005, it follows that approximately one-quarter of welfare recipients are considered dependent as per the official measures. In general, measures of welfare dependence are assessed alongside the statistics for poverty in general.

Government measures of welfare dependence include welfare benefits associated with work. If such benefits were excluded from calculations, the dependency rate would be lower.

Risk factors

Demographic

Welfare dependence in the United States is typically associated with female-headed households with children. Mothers who have never been married are more likely to stay on welfare for long periods of time than their counterparts who have ever been married, including women who became separated or divorced from their partners. In her study using data from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation, Patricia Ruggles found that 40% of never-married mothers remained on welfare for more than two years, and that while the median time spent on welfare for ever-married women was only 8 months, for never-married women it was between 17 and 18 months. Statistics from 2005 show that while only 1% of people living in married-couple families could be classified as welfare-dependent as per the government definition, 14% of people in single-parent family mothers were dependent.

Teenage mothers in particular are susceptible to having to rely on welfare for long periods of time because their interruption in schooling combined with the responsibilities of childrearing prevent them from gaining employment; there is no significant difference between single-parent and married teenage mothers because their partners are likely to be poor as well. While many young and/or single-parent mothers do seek work, their relatively low skill levels along with the burdens of finding appropriate childcare hurt their chances of remaining employed.

Black women are more likely than their White counterparts to be lone parents, which partially explains their higher rate of welfare dependency. At the time of the Moynihan Report, approximately one-quarter of Black households were headed by women, compared to about one in ten White households. Ruggles’ data analysis found that, in 1984, the median time on welfare for nonwhite recipients was just under 16 months, while for White recipients it was approximately 8 months. One year earlier, Bane & Ellwood found that the average duration of a new spell of poverty for a Black American was approximately seven years, compared to four years for Whites. In 2005, official statistics stated that 10.2% of Black Americans were welfare dependent, compared to 5.7% of Hispanics and 2.2% of non-Hispanic Whites.

William Julius Wilson, in The Truly Disadvantaged, explained that a shrinking pool of “marriageable” Black men, thanks to increasing unemployment brought about by structural changes in the economy, leads to more Black women remaining unmarried. However, there is no evidence that welfare payments themselves provide an incentive for teenage girls to have children or for Black women to remain unmarried.

There is an association between a parent's welfare dependency and that of her children; a mother's welfare participation increases the likelihood that her daughter, when grown, will also be dependent on welfare. The mechanisms through which this happens may include the child's lessened feelings of stigma related to being on welfare, lack of job opportunities because he or she did not observe a parent's participation in the labor market, and detailed knowledge of how the welfare system works imprinted from a young age. In some cases, the unemployment trap may function as a perverse incentive to remain dependent on welfare payments, as returning to work would not significantly increase household earnings as welfare benefits are withdrawn, and the associated costs and stressors would outweigh any benefits. This trap can be eliminated through the addition of work subsidies.

Other factors which entrench welfare dependency, particularly for women, include lack of affordable childcare, low education and skill levels, and unavailability of suitable jobs. Research has found that women who have been incarcerated also have high rates of social welfare receipt, especially if they were incarcerated in state prison rather than in county jail.

Structural economic factors

Kasarda and Ting (1996) argue that poor people become trapped in dependency on welfare due to a lack of skills along with spatial mismatch. Post-WWII, American cities have produced a surplus of high-skilled jobs which are beyond the reach of most urban welfare recipients, who do not have the appropriate skills. This is in large part due to fundamental inequalities in the quality of public education, which are themselves traceable to class disparities because school funding is heavily reliant on local property taxes. Meanwhile, low-skilled jobs have decreased within the city, moving out toward more economically advantageous suburban locations. Under the spatial mismatch hypothesis, reductions in urban welfare dependence, particularly among Blacks, would rely on giving potential workers access to suitable jobs in affluent suburbs. This would require changes in policies related not only to welfare, but to housing and transportation, to break down barriers to employment.

Without appropriate jobs, it can be argued using rational choice theory that welfare recipients would make the decision to do what is economically advantageous to them, which often means not taking low-paid work that would require expensive childcare and lengthy commutes. This would explain dependence on welfare over work. However, a large proportion of welfare recipients are also in some form of work, which casts doubt on this viewpoint.

The persistence of racism

One perspective argues that structural problems, particularly persistent racism, have concentrated disadvantage among urban Black residents and thus caused their need to rely on long-term welfare payments. Housing policies segregated Black Americans into impoverished neighborhoods and formally blocked avenues to quality education and high-paying employment. Economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s did not alleviate poverty, largely because wages remained stagnant while the availability of low-skilled but decent-paying jobs disappeared from American urban centers. Poverty could be alleviated by better-targeted economic policies as well as concerted efforts to penalize racial discrimination. However, William Julius Wilson, in The Truly Disadvantaged, urges caution in initiating race-based programs as there is evidence they may not benefit the poorest Black people, which would include people who have been on welfare for long periods of time.

Cultural

Oscar Lewis introduced a theory of a culture of poverty in the late 1950s, initially in the context of anthropological studies in Mexico. However, the idea gained currency and influenced the Moynihan Report. This perspective argues that poverty is perpetuated by a value system different from that of mainstream society, influenced by the material deprivation of one's surroundings and the experiences of family and friends. There are both liberal and conservative interpretations of the culture of poverty: the former argues that lack of work and opportunities for mobility have concentrated disadvantage and left people feeling as if they have no way out of their situation; the latter believe that welfare payments and government intervention normalize and incentivize relying on welfare, not working, and having children out of wedlock, and consequently transmit social norms supporting dependency to future generations.

Reducing poverty or reducing dependence?

Reducing poverty and reducing dependence are not equivalent terms. Cutting the number of individuals receiving welfare payments does not mean that poverty itself has been proportionally reduced, because many people with incomes below the official poverty line may not be receiving the transfer payments they may have been entitled to in previous years. For example, in the early 1980s there was a particularly large discrepancy between the official poverty rate and the number of AFDC recipients due to major government cuts in AFDC provision. As a result, many people who previously would have been entitled to welfare benefits no longer received them – an example of increasing official measures of poverty but decreasing dependence. While official welfare rolls were halved between 1996 and 2000, many working poor families were still reliant on government aid in the form of unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and assistance with food and childcare.

Changes in the practices surrounding the administration of welfare may obscure continuing problems with poverty and failures to change the discourse in the face of new evidence. Whereas in the 1980s and much of the 1990s discussions of problems with welfare centered on dependency, the focus in more recent years has come to rest on working poverty. The behavior of this particular group of poor people has changed, but their poverty has not been eliminated. Poverty rates in the United States have risen since the implementation of welfare reform. States that maintain more generous welfare benefits tend to have fewer people living below the poverty line, even if only pre-transfer income is considered.

In the United Kingdom

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government that took office in May 2010 set out to reduce welfare dependency, primarily relying on workfare and initiatives targeted to specific groups, such as disabled people, who are more likely to spend long periods of time receiving welfare payments. The Department of Work and Pensions has released a report claiming that Disability Living Allowance, the main payment given to people who are severely disabled, "can act as a barrier to work" and causes some recipients to become dependent on it as a source of income rather than looking for a suitable job. Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary for Work and Pensions, has argued that the United Kingdom has a culture of welfare dependency and a "broken" welfare system where a person would be financially better off living on state benefits than taking a job paying less than £15,000 annually. Critics argue that this is the government’s excuse to execute large-scale cuts in services, and that it perpetuates the stereotype that people on Incapacity Benefit or Disability Living Allowance are unwilling to work, faking their condition, or otherwise being "scroungers".

The previous Labour government introduced active labour market policies intended to reduce welfare dependency, an example of the Third Way philosophy favored by prime minister Tony Blair. The New Deal programs, targeted towards different groups of long-term unemployed people such as lone parents, young people, disabled people, and musicians, gave the government the ability to stop the benefit payments of people who did not accept reasonable offers of employment.