Ultimately, UBI is a libertarian idea of social welfare and it will appear lacking in the eyes of those who see Obamacare as a Republican health care plan that pales in comparison to real universal health care.
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He talked about setting up post offices for basic banking services.
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I stand corrected on AY not being a billionaire. Apologies.
Please let me know which other of my takes were bad or misinformation, as you allege that there are tons of them that I’m repeating. Thanks.
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Listen to Yang from 3:10 - 4:00 minute mark.
Does this sound like a libertarian?
Very few politicians will say this.
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And that is why I hate trying to defend a guy who speaks better than I do. Go look at his actual work directly instead of getting your opinions from intentionally slanted coverage.
I listened to it. AY accurately points out the myth of America being a meritocracy, using examples of access to top-tier post-secondary education, and our relative lack of socio-economic mobility. Many libertarians are able to do the same thing–point to disparate/inequitable outcomes IRL, and know that something is rotten in Denmark. Identifying the symptoms is relatively easy.
Where libertarians and people who are pro-capitalism like AY diverge from actual leftists is in the systems analysis and therefore what kinds of policies they propose to fix the inequities that we all agree we are seeing. AY views capitalism as a good system in need of some technocratic fixes. Leftists view the issues that we are faced with through a lens that is critical of the fundamental tenets and characteristics of capitalism.
It’s like if we were working in the ER and patients arrive who are bleeding out because they signed a contract allowing vampires to stab them and take a pint of blood every hour. The GOP says who cares, that’s life. The eDems toss them some bandaids. Libertarians say welp a contract is a contract. AY says give them a UBI that they can use to purchase stitches. Leftists say…why don’t we end the system of vampires stabbing patients.
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Any appetite in this country for listening to people who were actually right about the weakness of Joe Biden, rather than those who laid down for him the second it became personally beneficial?
Yes, this means Yang, who started taking the CNN paycheck to endorse Biden and ignore his weaknesses the literal second he dropped out
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I didn’t say identifying the symptoms is hard. I said very few politicians will say out loud what the symptoms are.
Their donors will not allow it.
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Andrew Yang would want to give the person enough money every month that they didn’t have to sign a contract to get stabbed by vampires just to live. If freedom from poverty is a libertarian ideal I guess I’m a libertarian.
UBI is the final solution for any form of poverty that originates from simply not having enough money. You get enough money to live a simple but not deprived life every month simply for being a citizen. Your time is your own to pursue the kind of life you want to have. Go forth.
He’s for that plus a robust set of government services. And you know what? The lack of means testing in this plan is a feature not a bug. Services we all enjoy are popular because we’re grateful to have them when we need them. Everyone would sleep better at night knowing that their month starts at +1000$ (which goes up with inflation / economic growth, the real dial we’re playing with is how much of the nations total economic activity do we want to redistribute evenly to prevent inequality from being a big problem) and not +0. Even rich people worry about being broke again some day. If you can drive by a homeless camp and not feel at least a little bit anxious you aren’t getting the message this version of capitalism is sending you. It’s like heads on pikes in ancient times.
That’s the thing that matters here about whichever policy we adopt…we have to be able to sell it to people who aren’t at all motivated by ‘doing the right thing’. They think we’re all cynical because they’re cynical. They think we must have an angle we’re working or we wouldn’t even claim to be for what we’re for. We have to get those people to buy in too. Even if VAT were literally just a sales tax (which it very much is not) you would have to spend 120k individually to break even on the 12k a month at a 10% VAT. No poor people are ever going to come close to that and the people who make 120k will probably be fine with the insurance not having much of a premium. Nobody who makes less than 300k is going to feel all that butt hurt about it. A VAT funded UBI is secretly a massive tax on large entities and individuals transactions.
The best thing about VAT tax is that it’s very hard to avoid. The biggest problem isn’t our tax rates it’s that the very wealthy don’t pay taxes at all. If your proposed solution doesn’t deal with that it’s not actually a solution. I’m not saying yours doesn’t, I’m saying it’s just Yang’s way of squaring this particular circle. He’s proposing we tax companies for access to the US market and use that to fund a healthy society.
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A new life awaits you in the off world colonies!
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I think its a very interesting use of “means tested” to have it not refer to a payment that is available in-full to the rich and very rich but perhaps not in-full to those already receiving government payments as a result of an inability to earn livable wages.
I’m not sure what the term for regressive means testing is or even if it exists.
I’ll concede what I just wrote is maybe a bit unfair. At the same time Yang ran a campaign that was drawing dead from the absolute start in terms of electoral success but still had people losing benefits–at least relative to people earning the full UBI–as part of his platform.
Yang has spoken a lot about how his UBI vision is about preventing a revolution. That’s a pretty clear answer to NBZ’s question, imo.
Yang has never held political office and has a political career of roughly two years that has been free of any meaningful consequences. I’m skeptical of him for the reasons stated as well as bias against the people I’ve come across who support him but ultimately its pretty damn unclear what he’s about because in real political terms he’s never had to be about anything.
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The current system that checks whether or not people qualify for aid helps them stay poor by taking benefits away if they actually improve their economic situation (often at a significantly steeper rate than they have improved their earnings) AND makes the programs massively less popular than they would be if they were universal. The entire existing social safety net is a dismal failure that is, at best, keeping a tiny fraction of the population from slipping from living in poverty with a roof over their head instead of being homeless… and is only doing that temporarily. It needs to be fully scrapped. Andrew Yang was insanely clear over and over again that he wasn’t in favor of making anyone’s situation worse, and he backed fully off of making people give up benefits to get UBI pretty early in the campaign.
I think we could lose food stamps, housing assistance, and literally every federal safety net program tomorrow and it would cause 13m people to slip into poverty according to the government. That’s not a very large segment of the total population and it doesn’t touch the vast majority of the bottom 60% literally all of whom need help.
Far left progressives are trapped in blind alleys in a few situations where legacy programs have already failed dismally, often because of GOP/eDem sabotage, but it’s important to your ideological framework for them to be defended. You’re wrong and these programs have already failed. The right way to deal with the problem is to learn what there is to learn from the (mostly political) failure of these programs so that we don’t repeat those mistakes when building the new system for fixing those problems.
I’ve actually been poor and I know exactly how big of a deal 1000 a month no strings attached would be for people earning <15 bucks an hour. It would be absolutely life changing.
There’s more to government aid than just the final dollar figure you receive. There’s also the hoops you have to jump through to get that dollar. UBI is zero hoops, no stigma (because everyone gets it), and if you do better they congratulate you instead of trying to catch you and claw back your benefit money.
A lot of people ITT seem to think that having the government make decisions is cost free. It most certainly is not, and there is no evidence to support that the government is good at making decisions. It is good at executing a procedure to the letter, quickly if designed correctly, but it’s a very slow ship to turn and it’s rarely calibrated well on the ease of use vs correct oversight spectrum… which means ideally you want to give it very simple instructions that don’t require a ton of complex decision making. Qualifying whether people deserve help or not on the basis of need is a great example of something the government is demonstrably shit at. It’s like trying to do microsurgery with a blowtorch and a gigantic pair of pliers. Good tools but a lousy application of those tools.
To be clear I’m all in favor of the government having a muscular role in society that is a significant % of GDP, but I think the right way to think about how progressive our policies are is on the spending side rather than on the revenue collection side. The taxes could be a good bit more regressive without doing any harm at all assuming the benefits package got drastically bigger and better. The poor would pay a greater share of their earnings/spending but recoup that additional cost + quite a bit more through the expanded programs.
What we have now is theoretically a pretty progressive system that barely taxes people who make <50k on the revenue collection side… but that spends the money more regressively than any other country on earth with running water. Unsurprisingly with the way the taxes get spent voters are unenthusiastic about voting for a larger government that costs even more money when they aren’t seeing much in the way of benefits for what they are already spending.
On the revenue side the most important thing is ease of collection and difficulty of avoidance. Our income tax system is absolutely riddled with holes that allow the well connected to avoid paying their share of the costs that society should be sharing. I’m a lot less worried about the top marginal tax rate (that only the employees fully pay, and then only up to a certain point where the tax advisors inevitably get involved) than I am about whether the government can actually collect those taxes.
Any plan you have to tax the wealthy has to contend with the fact that there is a full blown multi billion dollar industry whose whole purpose is helping the well off to avoid paying taxes. The best solution to those people is simple taxes that don’t have any holes in them at all. Even better if you can collect the taxes for a large amount of economic activity from one taxpayer which makes it possible to justify pretty rigorous enforcement since you have less possible targets to monitor. There’s a reason the rest of the world uses VAT taxes. It’s not because they’re stupid and we’re smart.
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Also to be clear I’m very much in favor of raising the top tax rate. I’m just realistic about the fact that income taxes are just about the best type of tax for tax avoiders that exists. It’s not an accident that it almost entirely hits the employed and almost entirely misses the truly staggeringly wealthy. As long as there are holes to be found the very wealthy are going to bore into them. Complexity truly is the enemy of tax collection and there is nothing lawmakers love more than hiding subsidies for their friends in the tax code.
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@Narrator…no… @SweetSummerChild!
no…where’s the @hahahahatheyllneverdothiswelcometomyworld account?
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racism ban
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Fair enough.
The line about revolution is something I’ve heard directly from his mouth multiple times. I think its fair to say its a line he is confident elucidates his perspective. To me it definitely hints at which side he’s represented by in the Tech Entrepreneur Playground vs Economically Just Society Venn Diagram that has support for UBI in the middle.
Something I’ve said before but struggle to effectively communicate (it may very well simply be a bad take) is how a lot of pro-UBI arguments I’ve seen seem based on right-wing assumptions about welfare except that in the case of UBI its impact is seen as a positive.
“Give people welfare and they won’t want to work” becomes “Give people UBI and they won’t need to work”.
“Give people welfare and they’ll be too satisfied to bother escaping being poor” becomes “Give people UBI and they won’t murder the wealthy”.
(To be clear, not being a right-winger I don’t accept these premises and I think class mobility in Europe vs the USA pretty much destroys them.)
I support UBI but I’m incredibly wary at the same time to the point of believing that not just the specifics of the policy itself are incredibly important but also the who and why behind its implementation.
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In my analogy with the vampires, the need to sign a contract that allows the vampires to take your blood is analogous to when sectors of our economy like finance, insurance, and real estate are designed to extract money from the bottom and direct it to the top. This is a fundamental aspect of capitalism–the owning class gets to extract economic rent for housing, health care, education, etc.
So, AY can advocate for UBI, but if he and we do not address the systemic issues, then the owning class will do to the UBI what it has always done to working people’s income–find ways to make sure as much as possible goes into the hands of the wealthy.
UBI is a stop gap. One that I am in favor of, just like you. But it is most definitely not the final solution. For the same reason that simply giving more blood to someone who is losing blood is not the final solution. You have to end the bloodletting–which means ending the systemic exploitation and extraction inherent in capitalism.
Being against means testing isn’t an original idea. Leftists have been against means testing since forever. I would encourage AY to embrace more good ideas, such as progressive rather than regressive taxation schemes.
I agree that working class people will be cynical about a UBI proposal that is instituted within the framework of the systems of exploitation that are currently used to extract their money and put it into the hands of the wealthy. Now, I’m not expecting AY to single-handedly institute a UBI and end capitalism, that would be a ridiculous expectation for me to have.
But, when AY champions UBI funded by a regressive tax like VAT, well I’m going to look at him skeptically, and you should too. And when AY proudly claims he’s a fan of the system that is exploiting the people he’s trying to help, well now I’m extra skeptical.
Back to the vampire analogy:
Me: Doctor Yang, the patient is bleeding out.
Yang: Give them this blood I took equally from everybody including other bleeding patients.
Me: OK…that’s seems like a non optimal way to get blood, but regardless, the vampires are still sucking his blood out.
Yang: Actually, I’m a fan of the vampire blood sucking system, so let that continue as you give him more blood.
Me: Are you a real doctor or did you just sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
A VAT is an overt regressive tax. It’s not secretly anything else. How do you think those cynical people you aspire to win over will react when they crack the code and discover that VAT is regressive? Bear in mind that all it takes to crack the code is googling “VAT”.
I took your advice, and went right to the source. AY’s campaign website says otherwise:
Which means that mendoza’s point stands:
Bro, you know I love you, but…all I can say that stays respectful is that if you showed up to a planning/organizing meeting of a leftist organization they’d be teaching you lessons, not the other way around.
I mean you correctly identify that the failures of USA#19’s social programs stem from them being implemented by politicians, paid off by their wealthy donors, who designed them to be intentionally hamstrung with means testing and elaborate hoop jumping schemes. We both know that Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” was written by neo-libs, not by far left progressives and most definitely not by leftists. Yet somehow you beleive that means that it’s leftists or far left progressives who are wrong and have some learning to do. That does not compute.
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I suppose its all futile anyway, but I think for UBI to be a means of achieving greater economic justice and not just crumbs to keep the poor alive and justify greater wealth among the rich there needs to be far stronger pro-working class policies securely in place.
If a substantial UBI is put in place with no single-payer healthcare, significantly higher minimum wage, worker/union protections, cheap university etc… then I think we’ll inevitably be well on the path to the UBI being a tool for the right rather than a means of economic justice.
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