Close to a half million people apply for shot at Andrew Yang’s $1,000-a-month offer
Americans are lining up in hopes they’ll be among the 10 lucky recipients of one of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividends.” As of Monday, at least 450,000 people had entered Yang’s raffle to receive the $1,000 per month allotment through his campaign website. recipients must visit Yang2020.com and enter their name, email address and Zip code. Entries will close Thursday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.
“The government is not capable of a lot of things, but it is capable of sending large numbers of checks to large numbers of people promptly and reliably,” Yang states on his campaign website. “We have this whole army of lawyers who signed off on it,” says Yang. “But I want everyone to reflect for a moment that we live in a world where a billionaire can spend over $10 million buying his way onto the election stage and everyone thinks that is totally appropriate. But then I’m literally giving money to Americans around the county to do whatever they’d like to help improve their lives, and that seems problematic.”
“It’s a form of campaign advertising,” campaign finance expert Rick Hasen of the University of California at Irvine’s School of Law tweeted Thursday.