If the current benefit system is broken, it is, and Andrew Yang’s UBI wont pull all people out of poverty or off that system dont you still have a partly broken system where people are in poverty?
It would help and there have been place which gave people straight up cash and it got them out of poverty and off the system faster so sure do it. But you still have a fucked up system where sometimes people will be below the poverty line.
Why not raise the level above the poverty line and scrap the current benefit system all together. Seems simpler than having UBI propped up by a broken system that it was supposed to fix in the first place.
I mean its messed up anyway. Some Yang supporters will say the current benefit system is broken and here is our fix which will in part rely on the broken system…
We disagree a lot about economics is all I can say. Also I scoured the campaign page you linked and couldn’t find the line you quoted. It was in the original plan and I actually disagreed with changing it. I extra disagreed with letting it stack with social security. A big giveaway to the boomers is a mistake. I would rather make the monthly figure bigger than make it stack with other programs.
Exploitation comes from power imbalances not from ‘capitalism’ (there are obviously quite a few power imbalances in our current economic system). There has been significant exploitation of people without power by people with power all through history. It’s a constant that dates back to the dawn of farming. Capitalism is a word that your crowd has turned into a stand in for everything bad about people… Even though you see the same problems in every society in history including the nominally leftist ones like the USSR. It’s power that causes the exploitation.
The problem isn’t ‘capitalism’ it’s that when human beings get power it literally changes how their brains work and they lose the ability to have empathy for other people. This isn’t an ideological problem and you can’t solve it through economic policy beyond minimizing the opportunities for it to happen.
I think that a sizable number of the power imbalances in the current system are rooted in people not having the resources to say no, which makes setting pay into a massive race to the bottom.
Right wing criticisms of our current welfare state have a ton of validity unfortunately. They were poorly designed (intentionally or not) and that has greatly reduced their effectiveness at helping people out of poverty.
I should be really clear here… I want to abolish poverty not alleviate it. I don’t want to need programs whose purpose is to ‘help the poor’ because I don’t think anyone should be poor in the first place. If the program has means testing I want it gone full stop. These programs are political cancer that are totally unworthy of defense.
I should also be clear that I don’t consider myself a capitalist or a socialist. I find both labels to be 19th century descriptors and the entire argument about capitalism or socialism should be settled (and would be if not for the Boomers tendency to never admit when they are wrong rubbing off on all of society). There are certain necessary tasks for society that are best performed by the government and there are certain tasks (that tend to be less necessary because of lots of possible substitute choices) that are best handled by private individuals. We have tried a large number of economic systems world wide over the last century or so and we have a lot of good data about what works and what doesn’t. I’m firmly in favor of doing more of the stuff that works well IRL and less of the stuff that doesn’t.
Nobody has ever enjoyed keeping an argument going by refusing to acknowledge unfavorable results like the Boomers IMO. The socialism vs capitalism argument is super settled though. It’s neither. I’m extremely interested in the development of a new model that takes what works about both and discards the rest.
I’m not fully sold on Yang, he seems fine and seems like someone who cares about people so I’ll give him a chance for now
Also when discussing his policies for his mayoral run, use his new site. A lot of his plans aren’t out so most of the policy stuff is just the usual political platitudes. For the most part he seems to understand the issues people are going thru and has some idea on how he thinks they could be fixed
And that’s Yang in a nutshell. The guy is just head down focused on what the problems are and how they could be fixed. Which if I had to say I had an ideology is certainly mine.
Too much ancient political/economic theory definitely isn’t good for helping you think about what is possible from here though. A massive number of the baked in assumptions that they are using simply are not in any way correct because of technological change or because they simply didn’t know as much then as we do now.
A great example of this is that late 19th century economics assumed that economics was the study of the division of scarce resources… and that material good would always be scarce. It’s very hard to even imagine what commercial life was like in the pre-industrial age now, but back then if you produced something it was a 100% certainty that someone would buy it from you. If the quality was lower all that was going to do is affect the price paid somewhat but someone out there didn’t have shoes and needed the shoes you made no matter how ugly or uncomfortable. Today we toss an absurd % of the stuff we produce because nobody wants it. Scarcity in 2020, at least of material goods, is a myth.
What is scarce is human capital. We have a massive oversupply of workers at the bottom of the skill ladder because our school system was designed to produce factory workers at the lowest possible per unit price rather than to produce problem solvers, which is what we need now at similar scale and can seemingly never get enough of. If something isn’t getting done in 2020 it’s because nobody capable of doing it thought it was worth the effort. You can fix that first part by investing whatever it costs into education.
But that’s a far future solution to a problem we have today… which is what on earth are we going to do with all of these unnecessary (economically) factory workers who are frankly past the point in life where they are likely to learn significant new skills? Do we let them die deaths of despair while their communities blight or do we bail them out?
I think we bail them out and it’s not close. We pay them an amount of money from now on that makes it possible to live out their lives in dignity… and we invest what it costs to retool our educational system to produce workers that are actually useful going forward. The good news is that our pie is so goddamn big it boggles the mind. We can bail out the workers of America and make them whole from the damage we did to them through our policy decisions over the last few decades. It was considerable, but the pie is pretty damn big now so theoretically the amount we need to redistribute should be pretty doable without causing too much weirdness.
Which is good because we have quite a few other things we need to work on. The solution to poverty though is straight cash.
Yeah I see it there. I’ve got links on top of links of him saying the opposite so he might be trying to have his cake and eat it to depending on the audience he’s talking to, or it might just actually be an oversight… or it might be something they changed back after he exited the primary.
No idea but I never wanted to see the current welfare system coexist with UBI. UBI is a replacement and massive massive expansion of the current welfare state. There’s no plausible reason to keep dumb shit like food stamps and housing vouchers when you could just send that person an equivalent amount of cash (which this is and then some usually even netting out the VAT).
The only people I can even imagine this hurting are like a community or two of the last public project dwellers in NYC or something whose housing is worth way more than 1k a month. There are like 100-200k of those people in the whole country tops in 2020. Everywhere else people are getting like 200 a week in food stamps max and the waiting list to be one of the 60k people in the state to get section 8 is 9 years long… and the apartment you get from section 8 has a market value of 375 dollars a month because it’s the dead center of the ‘bad part of town’.
Meanwhile there are thousands of individual homeless people who I see with my eyes every month who aren’t getting housing assistance OR food stamps. The hoops keep most of the eligible people out.
Yeah when it comes to our existing welfare state I’m more than happy to let the GOP go home and tell everyone they ended welfare in exchange for replacing it with something that has a chance of actually working. It’s what we would have done in the 90’s if the goal wasn’t just to cut funding for the safety net.
It’s 5-10 hours of fairly skill intensive work a week to get 1k a month in benefits out of the state in 2020. In most states it’s not even possible. The people currently doing this work are instantly better off simply from not having to do this work or mould their entire lives around not accidentally losing qualification for those benefits and going back on the multi year waiting list when the car breaks down.
There’s one additional point to this as well: I’ve known a LOT of couples (seriously it’s five couples one from my immediate family) who haven’t gotten married because getting married would cost the family one of the spouses benefits. Those couples are getting 2k a month out of this not 1k a month. It’s 1k per adult and this unit has two adults. 2k a month is a huge deal for a poor family roughly equivalent to one spouse getting two part time jobs and 50 hours of work a week (if that’s even doable with the way these jobs do on demand hours).
Do you think we throw away a shit load of food because there aren’t hungry people out there? Do we throw clothes away because everyone has ample clothing?
America is disgustingly wasteful because one of the main cultures here is consumerism. The corps want profit and they know which society is most wasteful so they point their resources to make bullshit that we will continuously buy here.
I’ve traveled to a lot of places where people would be grateful for getting the things we throw away and waste here. And one of the main reasons we have this wealth to waste here is because of our imperialism. We commit violence around the world to make sure our economic system stays in power and so that we can still have a lot of this wasteful bullshit continue.
There’s a reason that we are one of the biggest consumers of drugs in the world which has created an extremely violent industry all across Central America which we have encouraged and helped grow. Not only because it is financially great for the people involved but because it allows us to give those same corps and state actors another revenue stream with the “war on drugs.”
Our extremely consumer based sickness here is a product of the economic system we have imo and it is impossible to continue on this path. If we do then we will be the main reason the earth will be on fire in 50 years. Our military that upholds the system and the corps that feed into this system are the main reasons for our climate being destroyed.
You’re doing what most people do and assuming that distribution is free. There is nobody willing to pay enough to even make those products worth distributing. And that kind of waste is happening most places on earth not just here (even if not to the same degree the richer the population the more this happens). I’ve been there when quite a few loads of produce went sideways and I really do know what I’m talking about here.
And that theory you have about people being grateful for our garbage is a disaster for the countries who reuse our garbage. Instead of having a local textile industry producing local fashions you have entire nations dressed in our leftover fast fashion.
We’re a huge drug market because we have money. It’s also very lucrative because we made it super illegal and drove risk premiums into the clouds. They take plenty of drugs in other parts of the world too. Most of the countries with super draconian anti drug regimes are doing it to curry favor with us and it’s disgusting.
I agree that consumerism has gone way too far, particularly the emphasis of quantity over quality. I also agree that the whole planet has to find a way to live that prioritizes not using up all the resources… and that it’s going to take a massive government push worldwide to get it under control.
Our climate is being destroyed because the carbon extraction industry ran the full tobacco industry playbook and somehow that was allowed to remain a thing after tobacco. Several industries that are actually terrible for society are running this playbook and something needs to be done about it.