No you get it at 18. He’s for helping kids, but through things like free early childhood education for everyone better healthcare and the parents getting UBI. I don’t think he wants to remove any of the supports they currently get through taxes or whatever.
Lot of kids under eighteen are not living with their parents.
Whoever they are living with is getting 1k a month. I’m sure he’s for fully funding the system that takes care of kids in bad situations. I’m also sure that he’s the kind of person who would absolutely love to talk about all of this and figure out the correct thing to do. That’s just who you’re talking about.
Seriously the one thing I’m absolutely confident in is that Andrew Yang is a smart dude who is sincerely trying to make the world a better place. Every single decision or thing he’s ever said that I’m aware of supports this statement. His book the War on Normal People is very interesting because 1) it’s a serious book about policy and 2) it’s in no way shape or form about him.
You’re talking about a guy who saw how things were, wrote a book about it to make people aware, and then got told it was really smart. He’s a well educated guy who ran a well regarded charity so he knows a lot of elite people because he is one. They tell him it’s a good book but nothing can be done about it. He runs for president to draw attention to the message of the book.
You realize nothing about that is self serving when you read the book that caused all of this to happen. It’s pretty good. It belongs on my bookshelf and the econ books on my shelf are serious business.
Why are people talking about Andrew Yang in the Musk/Tesla thread?
I didn’t start it but I sure as fuck will finish it lol.
I was more talking about homeless kids.
Homeless kids is the kind of problem that genuinely needs its own specific solution. You create a government agency whose mission is to help homeless kids… and you give them a budget, metrics to hit, and some mission driven person with some talent who cares a lot about homeless kids to run it. Homeless kids need more help than 1k a month. There will probably be fewer homeless kids out there total with 1k a month going to every adult it does need to be said.
UBI is designed to solve several large problems in a pretty clean and efficient way. It’s not a cure all because nothing is a cure all. That’s why AY’s site had like 100+ policies on it. Each one of them is his best attempt at figuring out what a workable solution to a specific problem would be. That dude will change direction mid stride if the data changes, which is something we should all be seeking in our leaders in 2020. It’s also the really big reason he’s a substantially better version of Bernie Sanders. There’s zero chance Andrew will be for the same exact policies he’s for today in 2030. Bernie hasn’t updated much at all in his entire time in public life that I can tell. He’s directionally correct but I can’t tell if that’s because he was lucky or good. He sure didn’t produce much for a guy who was good.
Here’s one example of a characteristic of capitalism that needs ending, that you and I have touched on multiple times ITF: abolish landlords. That is identifying an exploitative hierarchical relationship that is codified and enforced under capitalism, and the end goal is abolition.
When you say reform capitalism, I take it to mean technocratic tweaks that address or ameliorate the symptoms while you leave the underlying system in place. I gather this from your posts, where you are against abolishing landlords, while advocating for more money or assistance for the people who are being exploited by landlords.
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So does a mother with two kids. Or anyone at the bottom really.
I’m all for giving everyone 1k a month but it’s no magic cure on its own.
Why do landlords have power over tenants? I know they do, but I want it in your words so that I can figure out exactly what you mean when you say abolish landlords. I could be for it. I suspect we both want to solve the imbalance but are just coming at it from different directions.
I see a universal power imbalance between poor people and just about everyone. I see it between them and their employers, their landlords, the criminal justice system, and with what passes for financial institutions in their world (mostly pawn shops and payday lenders). Any time you look at a so called service aimed at the poor be it a government entity or a private entity they get treated like shit because they don’t have the resources to do anything about it.
I don’t think it’s efficient to solve those power imbalances one by one, particularly when those relationships work semi well for the non poor (the criminal justice system least of all obviously… but still it’s hard to argue that the experience of middle class+ Americans with the criminal justice system is anything comparable to the experience of anyone the cops see as vulnerable). I guess I’d like to end poverty and then figure out which problems are still around at a size that actually needs a solution. I’d expect a lot of them to become quite a bit smaller.
As I said before in the landlord thread I’ve rented as a poor person from slum lords and I’ve rented as a middle class+ person from more normal landlords and the experience is night and day different. I don’t actually have a problem with housing as a service provided everyone has the realistic option to own a house that they can afford the rent on. I’m obviously very unhappy with REIT’s and private equity banksters vacuuming up single family homes.
I don’t know how we could expect to get any significant support for any of these ideas when half the country actively votes against their own interest, and half of the rest of the country isn’t going to support this either.
@sabo was way better at elucidating this, but the search function for this site either sucks or I suck at using it.
Capitalism enforces the ability of absentee owners to extract economic rents–this can take the form of landlords, usury, private equity firms, etc.
Absentee ownership rights are a social construct, not a fact of physics. So, the act of land-lording, like all absentee owners, is non-essential, and the exploitation is violently enforced.
Note that I am not saying abolish home builders, or abolish maintenance workers, or abolish any of the other essential components that go into constructing and maintaining our housing stock.
When a tenant hands over their rent check that money starts traveling up a pyramid scheme: tenant–>landlord/REIT–>bank–>mortgage back security–>derivatives–>credit default swaps.
All of the profits being made each step of the way, all the bonuses paid out to the traders at Goldman Sachs, all the annuities that are collected from the MBS’s, etc. Every penny comes from the tenant(or when the pyramid scheme bubble of compound interest inevitably bursts, it comes from being bailed out). And every entity I included in that scheme is just another middleman extracting and exploiting a person’s need for shelter. None of those entities build the housing or maintain the housing. The people who do the building and maintaining are doing real work.
To hit this from another angle. This ability to extract economic rents via absentee ownership is also done via imperialism, which quite often in our day and age is done entirely via international finance, like the IMF, World Bank, and their preferred private banking institutions. So, when we hear that some 3rd world country described as “underdeveloped”, substitute “over-exploited” and then we know what’s actually going on. Compare this to a poor person being described as “under-privileged”, well the privilege that they are lacking is the ability to extract economic rent. What makes them under-privileged is that they are the one being exploited.
ETA: The problems that are faced by exploited countries won’t be fully solved by giving them some money and leaving the imperialism in place. Heck, that’s what’s currently being done to them, and with deleterious effects. The problems that poor people face won’t be fully solved by giving them some money but leaving the systems of exploitation in place, either.
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So you seem to see the absentee part as really important. Why?
The housing market is a large thing backed by the government. I could certainly see cutting out the middle men and say having the post office make loans to people that were just backed by the central bank… but that would probably have some pretty major unintended consequences without doing it very carefully.
You’re not going to get me to say much positive about private equity, VC’s, or investment banks generally. At the same time I think financial products are an important part of how markets work and debt is not an inherently evil thing by any means. If anything cheap debt is the single biggest redeeming feature of the economic system over the last 100+ years. It’s very hard to express how hard it was to build anything new before the idea of lending money to build something new came to be. Whatever the downsides of modern finance there’s no argument to be made that it hasn’t had a huge mostly positive impact on human history. The reason why there’s so much rotten about it is that it’s a huge thing with a lot of power and a lot of insiders nearly all of whom are very aggressively self dealing.
But again my landlord is not exploiting me, Interactive Brokers is not screwing me, and Vanguard’s ETF’s are not screwing me either. The credit union I’m in the process of getting pre approved for a mortgage with is not screwing me. I’m not screwing anyone else in investing for retirement. I’m in no danger of reaching the point where I’ve accumulated so much excess wealth that it’s a systemic problem.
And again we come back to power dynamics which, in my opinion, are the at the root of many systemic problems. Once someone has a privilege other people don’t have it’s like a dog with a bone getting them to give it up.
So do the grocery stores and innumerable other people. The doctors are way more problematic than the landlords… there are way more landlords competing with each other than doctors. Where things get ugly is at the bottom where the landlords start competing over who will accept and then max screw more and more dejected poor people.
The problem is that it’s expensive to be poor. It’s expensive to be poor because everyone you interact with is taking advantage of the fact that you’re poor to abuse you. That changes dramatically every time you move one notch up on the social ladder… to the point where the top 40% largely think everything is fine and worry about losing what they already have any time anyone proposes any kind of change… and the real top of the pyramid the fucking law doesn’t even apply to.
Do you know how many times I’ve had to send someone money by Western Union and paid an absurd service fee to move a tiny amount of money because either I or the person I was dealing with was unbanked? That shit is at least as abusive as slumlords and it’s absolutely pervasive everywhere you do transactions as a poor person.
Your employer pays you less than it costs to live, your landlord charges you an unreasonable rate for the capital he has in your house essentially funding super aggressive collections practices at your expense, your car is from a buy here pay here car lot that charged you what the car was worth as a down payment and whatever the legal maximum interest was on double what the car was worth on the ‘car loan’. The car can be shut off remotely if you fall behind on the payments.
Being poor is fucking awful full stop. I don’t want anyone to be poor anymore. Poor is just another word for being societies designated victim. The person who will sacrifice their quality of life so that everyone else can have cheaper shit.
Does anyone else remember being poor and getting cascaded with overdraft charges every time some payment came a day later than it was supposed to? Did anyone else just say fuck it and stop using a bank for like five years? I did. I only came back when the option to turn off overdraft as an option became a thing. Just reject that shit if you want 33 dollars. That wasn’t abusive?
Everything you interact with is abusive when people know you can’t fight back. The kind of people who look for you as a customer are looking for you because that’s what they are looking for.
Yeah obviously I’m for universal healthcare but are you really disputing my point that almost every single person the poor transact with screws them? Because that seems pretty clearly true.
The difference between an absentee owner and an owner/occupant, or owner/operator is significant.
Really? How much rent have you paid lifetime? How much equity do you own? How much equity does someone else own because you paid their mortgage?
Insert meme here: If your landlord uses your rent check to pay the mortgage, then you’re the one providing them housing, not the other way around.jpeg
Your landlord is simply the front line gatekeeper between you and your shelter. You and every tenant is getting piled on by rent-seekers all the way up the pyramid scheme: tenant–>landlord/REIT–>bank–>mortgage back security–>derivatives–>credit default swaps. And if and when you sign a mortgage to buy your home, that only cuts out one layer of pyramid scheme.
Now you may be thinking, “that’s just how housing works”. You may not feel exploited–many of the exploitative aspects of our system are so ingrained into our psyche that it’s like how most of the time you don’t notice that you’re breathing, but it’s happening. The greatest trick an exploiter can ever pull is to convince the exploited that their “arrangement” is natural, they’re doing you a favor, or that there’s no alternative. Especially when it is in fact violently enforced, unnatural, and there is an alternative.
And even if one individual doesn’t feel exploited, the entire system is exploitative. Donald Sterling, disgraced and racist former owner of the LA Clippers, is a billionaire slumlord. All the money that was used to build, maintain, and manage the properties he owns came from the tenants. He doesn’t build manage or maintain his properties, other people do that work. And on top of that he’s a billionaire.
If Donald Sterling had never existed, all of those homes would still have been built, maintained, occupied, and paid for. He is entirely superfluous. His landlordism has added zero value to other people’s lives. Just like the serf didn’t need the king, and the slave didn’t need the master–the tenant doesn’t need the landlord. On the other hand, Donald Sterling’s networth is entirely dependent upon tenants, without them, he’d have nothing but empty homes, no income and no wealth.
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People rent for a variety of reasons, including wanting to maintain the flexibility of being able to easily relocate. Who is going to provide housing for these people at the bare bones cost of acquiring and maintaining the property? Nobody, that is who.
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A lot of people who want flexibility to relocate live in apartment buildings. So for example, in that case the people paying the rent are providing the funds for the housing they live in, and the maintenance of it. The builders build it, the maintenance people maintain it, the managers manage it. The landlords…what is it that they do here? Sit back and watch their bank account grow? That’s not a real job, so that can be downsized out.
I will gladly, and sadly, acknowledge that we currently live in a society where threatening our fellow citizens with violence if they don’t pay for housing and then on top of that provide someone who isn’t doing work with a payoff to avoid that violence is socially acceptable. A different world is possible.
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Somebody has to come up with the money to pay for the land, the builders, and the supplies required. That typically requires a loan. Then there are ongoing expenses such as maintenance and insurance. Who is going to come up with that money without a profit motive?
Millions of people live in housing that was built without a profit motive.