You have to choose between the two. If you take freedom dividend you have to give up food stamps/cash assistance. He has flip flopped over whether you also need to give up social security and various other benefits.
It’s extremely regressive in that sense.
Rumors of Biden’s demise are still too early. Latest morning consult has him up 33-20 over Sanders (Liz 15) and 31-17 over Sanders in early primary states (Liz 12 and steyer over Pete 6-5 lol)
Such a weird post. Do you think Warren has had a secret conversation with the Rock where they’ve conspired to enact Republican policies once she’s elected? Like does he have some kind of information about what kind of President she’ll be that you don’t? Or are you too lazy to evaluate her candidacy on your own so you rely on cues from others to form your opinions?
The existing welfare programs are hot garbage that keep people poor. That’s not a hot take, that’s what means tested means. Regressive is taking away someones benefits because they figured out how to make 100 a week more than the cutoff for their benefits.
I’m sorry but 99.5% of the people I see make this point have never been poor enough to almost get benefits but not quite. Our existing safety net is trash and most poor people get nothing.
Yang has (and to be clear I don’t agree with this) decided that people who get Social Security would get the Freedom Dividend. If it was up to me we’d give the boomers nothing, but it isn’t. He’s in favor of truing up the benefits of anyone who decides to keep what they have instead of going with the FD because he doesn’t want to make anyone worse off.
Let’s be super clear though… the whole narrative of ‘the FD is regressive’ is BS. Yes it’s not going to help the people who already get help as much as it helps everyone else. The important thing to remember is that for every person who gets help there are several people who make 9-12 bucks an hour and don’t qualify for benefits of any kind that live lives of quiet desperation. It’s also important to remember that benefits today are very stigmatized and funding them is a political loser. The FD will be wildly popular on the other hand and getting it increased in the future will be relatively easy.
We need to stop separating people by income in this country. Middle class people resent poor people for getting something they don’t get. Politically that’s absolutely awful. Doing away with means testing will enable us to raise benefits without having to explain why we’re helping every crappy poor person who is poor because they suck (and there are a lot of these people… I know a lot of them personally so please don’t be a patronizing rich/educated person and tell me that they don’t exist).
The FD is very popular with poor people when you explain it to them, so clutching your pearls on their behalf is downright colonialist. They don’t want the means testing to go on either. Nobody likes being afraid to get a raise because it could cause them to lose their housing assistance, food stamps, and health care. Nobody likes being stuck living in one place because if they move they would have to go through the process of getting benefits all over again and that could take months to years. It took my mom two years to get disability again when she moved from CA to KY for instance. She’d see a 250 dollar a month raise from the FD and would be super grateful for the extra money and flexibility.
Maybe its because Ballers is a bad show and Liz likes it
Agree to disagree. I think Warren, Pete, and Yang all have the same level of charisma as Obama. I think we tend to put people who have already won on a pedestal. Obama is charismatic but it’s not as freakish as people act like it is.
chefs kiss
Yeah his plan could hurt a lot of people then. Wonder if new people who need help would have to take the FD over other programs.
He’s for truing them up so that they don’t lose ground to the VAT tax. 1000 a month without any restrictions is quite a bit better than what most people on assistance get today.
Do you have any lived experience with being poor enough to get any kind of welfare? It’s pretty obvious from the answer is no from where I’m sitting.
Ive been dirt poor and gotten assistance before…im still right now on the lower end of the spectrum. There is no way a mom and a few kids could live off a thousand a month.
No wonder reps like him…
When do you start getting the benefit at eighteen? If someone chooses it can they change their mind and get other assistance?
Yeah, do kids get the freedom dividend too?
I’m not a fan of means testing myself, but am of other non-means tested services like free school breakfast, lunch and dinner, M4A, public transportation, college, adult education, etc.
Giving $1000 per mo to rich people doesn’t matter a bit. Just raise taxes more to make up for it.
FWIW I was on Medicaid for a few years after law school while I looked for work and did LSAT tutoring to pay rent. I could have qualified for food stamps but for whatever reason never signed up. For another year following that I made barely too much to qualify for Medicaid but got significant ACA subsidies so my silver level HMO was essentially free - maybe like 20 bucks a month.
I had parents who could help me out in a jam, and I had marketable skills and could have probably found a non-legal job fairly quickly, so I’m not going to pretend that I had the same experience as someone who is truly in poverty. But tbh I’m not really sure why that’s relevant either way - you don’t need to have been in poverty to point out that my wife and I who are comfortably upper-middle class would increase our household income by 24k/year while a single mom a few blocks north of us who gets 800/month in various benefits would raise her household income by 2.4k/year. Factor in inflation and the VAT he proposes to fund it and the single mom might be worse off.
This is a good post. UBI could be good, even for people in assistance now, or it could be bad. It depends on the numbers. Is Yang’s plan even meant to help people and society or a right-libertarian plan to use the smallest amount of money to have the government wash its hands of social responsibility?
So I’ve done some research and the only programs you’d be opting out of to get the FD would be TANF, SNAP, WIC, and SSI. Housing assistance you’d keep. Those programs (except for disability) provide nothing in the neighborhood of 1000 a month.
We really need to scrap the means tested welfare system in favor of a package of benefits that all citizens get no matter what. This will enable us to increase government benefits without triggering envy in the people who make just slightly too much to get help.
Housing assistance is usually by far the biggest benefit that your theoretical single mother would lose.
But let’s be really clear here for a second. Her kid has a father. That guy is now getting 12,000 a year and currently he gets nearly 0. Now he’s going to be paying child support, and that’s going to make a huge difference for her.
Yang is also wants to do time banking and a bunch of targeted stuff at zoning, education, and healthcare all of which should help that single mother out quite a lot. The paid maternity leave, early childhood ed for all, and the mandatory paid leave probably help a lot too.
We need to stop helping people make poverty something survivable and help them stop being poor. That involves flexible help that keeps helping after their head is above water. Yang is literally the only candidate offering any kind of cash assistance to people who make 25-35k a year which is the bulk of the bottom 60% of the population. They need that money badly, and they don’t need it as a minimum raise hike that will further incentivize automation.
The waiting list for section 8 in my area is over 5 years. So fi kinda eliminates the whole temporary hand up out of a tough spot idea.
I think it’s closer to, “smallest amount of money needed to stop the coming automation-caused uprising before it happens.” I like the guy and agree with a lot of what he says and how he thinks about things, but it’s also clear that he doesn’t think the rich are too rich or have any lefty sensibilities.
He’s for raising their tax rates a lot to pay for a lot of this stuff. He’s very in favor of actually collecting the money. There’s a reason why the rest of the world uses the VAT tax. It’s because they’ve figured out that inflation doesn’t go up by 10% when you put in a 10% VAT tax. It’s more like 3.5-4%. The gap between that 3.5%-4% and 10% is coming from firms not consumers.
Sanders releases ‘plan for journalism’
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released a new proposal today that would reform journalism by cracking down on major media mergers and increasing funding for public media at the local level.
“Walter Cronkite once said that ‘journalism is what we need to make democracy work.’ He was absolutely right, which is why today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis—and why we must take concrete action,” Sanders wrote in a Columbia Journalism Review article announcing the plan.
Among other things, Sanders’ proposal calls for stronger enforcement of antitrust laws against tech giants, who have eaten up a large share of digital advertising, and required disclosure of whether proposed media mergers would result in layoffs.
The announcement also comes as Sanders has faced criticism for his comments about the press. The Vermont senator suggested earlier this month that Washington Post journalists were covering his campaign in a negative light because the newspaper is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Sanders has previously criticized Amazon’s business practices.
Sanders later walked back the comments, clarifying that he does not think the press is “anti-Bernie,” but some of his senior advisers have continued to assert that their boss has been unfairly covered in the media.
As A UK citizen, Joe in our eyes is a sellout, a piece off trash not worth picking up and this advert makes my thinking correct.
The third debate of the Democratic presidential primary may actually be a first for this election season: a one-night event.
Democratic presidential candidates have until the end of tomorrow to qualify for the September debate in Houston, and so far only 10 candidates have hit both the polling and donor thresholds. (Each candidate must register at 2 percent or more in four qualifying polls and receive donations from 130,000 donors to participate.)
If an 11th candidate qualifies, the Democratic National Committee will split the debate into two nights: Sept. 12 and Sept. 13. But if no one else qualifies, the debate will only take place on Sept. 12.
Tom Steyer
(@TomSteyer)
I’m thrilled to announce that today we’ve reached the required 130,000 individual donors to appear in September’s debate. Just one more qualifying poll stands between us and that stage!
Thanks to all who’ve contributed even $1 to this movement. We can’t do this without you.
August 13, 2019
Billionaire activist Tom Steyer only needs one more qualifying poll to participate, so he could still make the cut. Other candidates seem less likely to qualify. But even if they don’t make the stage this time around, candidates will have more time to qualify for the October debate. So there may be more participants in the fourth debate than the third.