 What's going to happen is the robots will be able to do everything better than us. I mean, all of us, you know. I'm not sure exactly what to do about this. Tech billionaire Elon Musk isn't the only one freaking out over our new robot overlords. Fears of automation-induced mass unemployment are at the center of a push for a universal basic income, or UBI, in which the government sends everyone a monthly check, regardless of wealth. Though the idea has been kicking around for centuries, it really caught fire recently because of Andrew Yang, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, and to be mayor of New York in 2021. His new memoir and political party, both called forward, put UBI at the center of his agenda. Last year, polls showed a majority favoring the idea, and cities like Los Angeles, St. Paul, Atlanta, and Newark are experimenting with or considering local UBI's. Yang says cash payments are better than government programs, for the same reason that the libertarian economist Milton Friedman advocated slashing social welfare in favor of direct subsidies to the poor, because it's more effective to put unrestricted cash directly in the hands of those who need it. This is one thing that I believe I'm fundamentally aligned with libertarians on, is I think people know best how to solve their own problems and what they need. Then a government program, I think that a lot of these bureaucracies are very inefficient. They're also somewhat punitive, where I talk to people who are subject to them and they live in fear and anxiety all the time, that they're going to fill out a form wrong or miss an interview and then have it taken away from them. I really like Andrew Yang's disposition, his refusal to engage in the dumbest culture war skirmishes, and his willingness to call out Republicans and Democrats. But I think he's wrong to claim that a UBI wouldn't do massive damage to American labor markets and the federal balance sheet. During the pandemic, the government shelled out for three rounds of stimulus checks to about 90% of households, including sending money to the well-to-do, and it supplemented unemployment benefits by as much as $600 a week. One of the negatives of this time in my mind, Nick, is that we're tying so much of the money to not working. You know, like I talked to a 25-year-old young person who was getting 500, 600 bucks a week and said, like, look, I'm not going to look for a job until this train runs out. Yang says that an advantage of a UBI is that it's not tied to employment status, but I think giving people money for nothing would make them less likely to show up for a hard day's work. The number of job openings in the United States has reached historic highs, even as the labor force participation rate, the percentage of working-age adults who either have jobs or are looking for work, is almost two points lower than before the pandemic began. Here's another problem with the UBI. Why should middle-class Americans, not to mention millionaires and billionaires, get a check from the government just for being alive? Making it universal has many benefits. It reduces any stigma. It makes it a true right of citizenship. It gets rid of all of the administration and game playing. No one's going to be having to misrepresent what their financial circumstances are. I'm not a big fan of a lot of the means testing because of both the administration and the game playing that goes on. We miss a lot of people every time we try and draw lines. Maybe Yang is right that giving everyone a check would make the program easier to administer. But does billionaire Elon Musk really need even more taxpayer money than he's already raking in? Such largesse is particularly hard to defend given that the federal budget has cracked $6 trillion in each of the past two years and the national debt is approaching $30 trillion. When he was running for president, Yang said the cost of giving every American citizen a monthly check would be partly covered by phasing out certain amounts of existing spending, something that virtually never happens. And even sympathetic analyses of his plan noted that its cost would soak up all existing federal tax revenues, resulting in either massive deficits or humongous new tax hikes. Senator Warren, I've been talking to Americans around the country about automation and they're smart. They see what's happening around them. Their main street stores are closing. They see a self-serve kiosk in every McDonald's, every grocery store, every CVS. In fact, historically, game-changing innovations haven't reduced the total number of jobs. For all the talk about the sudden disruptive loss of good-paying industrial jobs, the fact is that manufacturing peaked at around 40% of all employment in 1943. Since then, it's been a steady, uninterrupted decline over decades, and yet there's been no shortage of work opportunities in new industries. Driving a truck is the most common job in 29 states, including this one. Three and a half million truck drivers in this country and my friends in California are piloting self-driving trucks. Self-driving cars displacing truck drivers and delivery men are likely decades away, and those productivity gains will one day enable entrepreneurs to create whole new industries with work opportunities not yet conceived. Even in industries directly impacted by automation, the result is often more jobs rather than fewer. There are some structural issues with our economy, where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don't go to a bank teller. Obama's analysis is wrong. After banks rolled out ATMs in the 1990s, the number of bank tellers increased in the ensuing decades. And in the years after supermarkets and retailers introduced barcode scanning, the number of cashiers increased by more than 50%. Andrew Yang's UBI isn't going to be implemented anywhere anytime soon, but enhanced unemployment benefits are going away. So we'll soon find out whether getting less money from the government spurs more people to go look for work. If and when they do, job seekers will find an economy where employers are begging for help and offering unprecedented incentives from appetizers to signing bonuses to free tuition to get people to start punching a clock again. That's not Andrew Yang's way forward, but it has the benefit of reducing dependency on the state, re-energizing the labor market, and not making the government even more broke than it already is.