Andrew Yang, the Minimum Income Advocate for the City of Wall Street

Andrew Yang, on the New York subway on April 5, SPENCER PLATT / AFP

To propose a capitalism with a human face and a universal basic income in the cradle of Wall Street, in the city with the highest concentration of millionaires in the US - a million, they say - sounds strange, but both ideas are the backbone of Andrew Yang's program. for mayor of New York. The Democrat, who unsuccessfully attended the last presidential primaries of his party, tries his luck again in politics after a career as a third-sector entrepreneur that has earned him distinctions - and the pat on the shoulder of Barack Obama - and while his Adoption city hurts from the ravages of the pandemic and aspires to regenerate to return to what it has always been, "the capital of the world", in Yang's own definition.

Heading into the Democratic primary in New York on June 22, Yang seems the best-placed candidate (in March, he was 13 points ahead of his competitors); the one with the greatest public projection, thanks to an exhaustive campaign in networks - more than two million followers on Twitter - and a dynamic and unconventional style, not at all political: among his proposals as presidential candidate, he raised the public financing of marriage counselors , that figure so ingrained in the daily miseries of Americans.

Yang (Shenectady, New York, 46 years old), a first-generation American -he is the son of Taiwanese parents-, is the best known of the twenty Democratic candidates for mayor of New York, and many already see him as the successor of the also Democrat Bill de Blasio after the November 2 elections. His affable proposals are not part of the ideology of the most progressive faction of the Democrats, boiling in some districts of New York as an alternative to the old

establishment.

and as a test bed for the future of the party.

Yang leans more for the official line and in the last elections he actively campaigned for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, so he is not lacking in strong allies.

With the most left wing of the party he has had sounded differences, for example with regard to street vendors, whose activity Yang is in favor of limiting.

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He embarked on the adventure of the Democratic primaries to the White House as a complete stranger, and dismounted from it in February 2020, without winning a single delegate in the Iowa caucuses, with more projection than many career politicians. His inexperience in government and administration tasks is his main asset and his greatest handicap; also, the fact that in his 24 years in Manhattan he has not voted once in local elections, because, he argues, "it is something that is taken for granted, for granted." More weight may have been against him, the fact that he spent most of the pandemic in a house 80 miles from the city, which earned him much criticism. But Yang, heterodox in everything, does not give importance and refers to the autism of one of his children as a justification for the transfer.

Like Don Quixote, he fights against particular windmills: robots, responsible for driving millions of Americans out of the job market. But from condemning the automation of work to defending a minimum income, like his veteran coreligionist Bernie Sanders, it goes a long way. Yang's program also proposes that the city hire 10,000 recent graduates as tutors for the 100,000 children who have suffered the most from lost school hours due to the pandemic; he presents himself as "father of public school children." Also the aforementioned minimum income ($ 1,000 per month) for the half million New Yorkers living in extreme poverty; a network of public banks, make the city a pole of the cryptocurrency business, build casinos and convert hotels into affordable housing,in addition to guaranteeing the individual and non-transferable ownership of the data. A hipster arcade with the scent of social democracy, in short, to revive a city decimated by the pandemic.

Yang enjoys a special reputation among the Asian community, with growing political traction in the country and also experiencing an increase in hate crimes since the pandemic began. He himself suffered bullying because of his origin. After studying Law at Columbia, he dedicated himself to creating

startups

in the third sector, to raise funds for social causes; the sale of one of them made him a millionaire. In 2011 he founded Venture for America, a newbie talent incubator for companies and economically lagging areas that created thousands of jobs. Thanks to Venture for America, Yang made contacts in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, and was designated a "champion of change" by Barack Obama.

Besides the Democratic president, Yang's main supporter is Martin Luther King III, a human rights activist and the eldest son of the assassinated Reverend Martin L. King, the icon of the civil rights struggle. King III highlighted Yang's social conscience and concern for the underprivileged. The music sounds good, critics say, but the fine print - how to pay the bill for your original proposals - does not quite read well at a time of budget deficit, and in a city that is economically exhausted despite the large number of millionaire neighbors .