New York, Jan 14 (EFE) .- Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate, officially launched his candidacy for mayor of New York on Thursday, a career that has started with problems for the technology entrepreneur after it was learned that he left the Big Apple during what worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Yang presented his campaign at an event in Manhattan, backed by New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, and with a message focused on recovering from covid-19 and fighting poverty.
The businessman raises as his main proposal a modified version of his flagship project in the Democratic presidential primary: a universal basic income of $ 1,000 a month for all Americans.
In this case, however, the measure would not be universal and its amount would be less, since an annual aid of about $ 2,000 is proposed that would benefit half a million people with fewer resources, in a city of more than eight million.
Yang argues that it is the “largest basic income program in the country” and that the idea would be to expand it in the future.
“The inhumane economy with which we have been fighting to survive has become even tougher during the pandemic,” he said at the ceremony this Thursday, in which he denounced the worsening of the problems of poverty and economic insecurity that already existed in Nueva York with the disease, which has had one of its great epicenters in the Big Apple.
Yang was a total stranger on the political scene until he appeared in the Democratic primary, but now he is one of the star names in the fight to succeed Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York in which there are already more than two dozen of Names.
The main ones include current Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams; City Attorney Scott Stringer; Mayor De Blasio’s former attorney, Maya Wiley; or former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire.
This week, even before making his candidacy official, Yang already encountered the first setback, after publishing that since the outbreak of the pandemic he has spent more time in his second residence, in a rural area of New York state, than in his Manhattan flat, something his critics have already started to use against him.
The businessman justified his decision because of the difficulties of working with two children in an apartment, a comment that only made things worse, since it made many New Yorkers very ill who have been in much worse situations during the health emergency.
Furthermore, his lack of interest in local politics is criticized given that Yang has never voted in mayoral elections in his nearly 25 years in the city. EFE
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