Andrew Yang's Presidential Bid Is So 21st Century
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Being a (1) "good grades" person trying to (2) solve "bad grades" problems (like things the govt. does) and (3) having essentially no personal experience in "bad grades" problems is a recipe for disaster.
To keep this on topic to the forum, this cultural disconnect between good grades and bad grades society makes it really hard for giant tech companies to enter new markets.
In my personal experience, a clear example of this is Google Stadia, which is all good grades people who don't really play games trying to make a product for bad grades people who play games all the time; or bad grades people who couldn't work at Google but are talented in some other way so they work for a game studio.
It's also why so many investors get sucked in by "fraudsters." They have the intuitive notion that being in bad grades society makes you more effective at understanding the average person's problems. But the interface between good and bad grades involves a lot of lying!
Andrew Yang is kind of a distilled example of this, talking about stuff that only people who lived in exclusively good grades society would believe is effective on the face of it. It's not quite the same as being super rich versus super poor (the typical dichotomy), because many people are super rich and got bad grades and just don't believe in the supremacy of technocracy as dearly as people who are its biggest beneficiaries.
The real problem is that when you're so deep in the thick of good grades, it's so extremely hard to open up your perspective. You think you're entitled to make all the decisions, and you think wielding power safely is to do so while expressing photographed emotions between dispassionate and smiling.
Meet the Zuckerberg Robot Meme the Presidential Candidate. At least Mark Zuckerberg had the good sense to look at the Facebook data and his New Jersey ed-tech experiment realize how deeply unelectable (and unqualified) he is.
Are you trying to make some kind of insinuation as to people’s intelligence here? Do you literally mean people who got good grades in high school and college versus those that didn’t get good grades? Clarifying your base definitions would be very helpful in understanding the point you’re trying to make.
So the company gets the employees they deserve, not the employees they need. That isn't to say that Batman isn't worthy of respect. Batman saves the company over and over again every day. But they really needed Harvey Dent. Unfortunately, whenever a Harvey Dent goes to work for that company finally, he either dies a hero and has to leave, or he lives long enough to become the villain that just perpetuates the monstrosity and makes it worse. Hey, he's getting his paycheque, whatever, who cares anymore. The company is still alive and paying me. Before, I was so idealistic. Then I was biding my time while looking for a better opportunity at another company. Now I'm so full of apathy and cynicism that I'll just feed the machine while the machine pays me. I've got mouths to feed and my employees like how I still play the hero now and then. Heck, they even think I'm Batman, not Two Face. But every now and then, I'll backstab Batman, because look at what I am now. I'm not Harvey Dent anymore, I'm Two Face. But don't say that I'm not doing my job.
Companies get the people they deserve, they rarely get the people they need. Andrew Yang is trying to be Harvey Dent.
My point about video game developers is that there are plenty of people who are really smart but got bad grades, so they got different opportunities but turned out really successful. But if you got bad grades, you're pretty much guaranteed to not be working at Google.
It's about a difference of opportunities, and how it relates to personal stories (like this candidate's), and how your opportunities / personal stories can affect your ability to lead.
I don't really believe that.
> lack the understanding for how to properly lead the people in society who don’t integrate as well into these existing systems.
Not really about that either.
Looking at things the way you do is a very "good grades" point of view.
When I was talking about "bad grades" people problems as government problems, I meant like being a beneficiary of a social assistance program like SNAP. The only person Andrew Yang regularly interacts with on SNAP is his kids' nanny. He's never lived that life, never received government assistance, practically no one in "good grades" society has during their adult life. The nanny didn't fail to integrate into "existing systems." She doesn't lack "natural talent."
An idea of "good grades" society is systemizing comparisons like that, that one person is better than another at something, whereas government leadership is fundamentally about one person-one vote and preserving the commons.
He's not someone that was distantly removed from the issue as he was highly aware and swimming deep in it. He realized after a while, that because he was only bringing in a few thousand jobs from starting new companies compared to the hundreds of thousands lost each year due to automation, that the only good avenue of making real change was driving national dialogue to accelerate meaningful solutions via running for president.
I keep talking to my wife about this in her work. She can't properly manage anyone but the "A and B+ students." She tells people exactly what they should be doing, largely leaves it up to them as to how it fits in with the bigger picture, then expects them to do it. The problem comes in with her reports who are the "B-, C, and D" students. They don't follow her instructions, they're oblivious as to how what they're doing might affect the rest of the company, and she doesn't know how to change their behavior. (She doesn't have full power over hiring. I keep telling her she should work for a startup.)
The real problem is that when you're so deep in the thick of good grades, it's so extremely hard to open up your perspective. You think you're entitled to make all the decisions, and you think wielding power safely is to do so while expressing photographed emotions between dispassionate and smiling.
I wonder if this is what high level Chinese officialdom is like? I've often heard the quip that in the US, politicians are mostly lawyers, while in China, they're mostly engineers.
Do you have a citation for this? I searched and didn't see anything.
https://www.yang2020.com/policies/early-childhood-education/
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-plan-for-universal-child-c...
That's why in software, we think agile is better than waterfall.
"This website was built & is maintained by volunteers with no official relation to Bernie Sanders. We’re regular people, unassociated with any Super PACs or billionaires. "
If he has a platform, he doesn't have a shred of it on his own site.
The means to pay for a Universal Basic Income will come from 4 sources:
1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of Universal Basic Income because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits.
2. A VAT. Our economy is now incredibly vast at $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years alone. A VAT at half the European level would generate $800 billion in new revenue. A VAT will become more and more important as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software.
3. New revenue. Putting money into the hands of American consumers would grow the economy. The Roosevelt Institute projected that the economy would grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs. This would generate approximately $500 – 600 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity.
4. We currently spend over one trillion dollars on health care, incarceration, homelessness services and the like. We would save $100 – 200 billion as people would take better care of themselves and avoid the emergency room, jail, and the street and would generally be more functional. Universal Basic Income would pay for itself by helping people avoid our institutions, which is when our costs shoot up. Some studies have shown that $1 to a poor parent will result in as much as $7 in cost-savings and economic growth.
1. The $500 billion spent on welfare and other income support programs is usually significantly more generous than what a recipient would receive through Yang's proposed UBI. The fact you don't have to cover some people who already receive even more generous benefits doesn't "save you money" in any real sense. There is no real reason someone would choose a UBI over these programs except paperwork.
2. A VAT only gets you $800 billon a year when you need at least something like $3 trillion. This policy is also a little hard to understand if you are left leaning; don't you want to spend new tax revenue on something like universal healthcare, reducing the cost of college or renewable energy expansion? If you raise taxes to pay for a UBI it just becomes harder to raise tax revenue for any other priorities.
3. The roosevelt institute study assumed that the economy was almost completely constrained by demand to the point where even if the UBI was funded entirely through debt the net result would be an economy 13% larger after eight years. Leaving aside whether you agree with their simulation(I don't); this is an incredibly risking bet, if you are wrong that the economy is constrained by demand you have dramatically increased the federal deficit and probably caused a fiscal crisis in the process which would, of course, dramatically shrink the economy. It's interesting to note that the Roosevelt study doesn't actually model Yang's proposal of financing essentially the cost of a UBI through taxes/ spending cuts with the rest through deficit spending and it's hard to see how he came up with the numbers here.
4. So assuming you can save $100-200 billion on other government programs and you get everyone who uses welfare assistance to sign up for a UBI instead you aren't even halfway to the $3.6 trillion dollar price tag.
> 1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of Universal Basic Income because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits.
Making UBI a choice vs. existing programs is administratively problematic (and, also, makes no sense.) But a lot of current welfare spending is state and local, and some of what he mentions (disability insurance) is not only state/local, but not classic welfare spending, it's insurance against loss of income, which UBI, despite raising the income floor, does not provide or meaningfully substitute for.
> A VAT. Our economy is now incredibly vast at $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years alone. A VAT at half the European level would generate $800 billion in new revenue.
What's the “European Level” referenced here? European VAT levels range between something like 8% and 27%.
> A VAT will become more and more important as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software.
Yes, you can collect tax on income gained through capital investments like robots and software. We do that today, just at lower rates than labor income, but there's nothing fundamental that requires such lower rates.
> New revenue. Putting money into the hands of American consumers would grow the economy. The Roosevelt Institute projected that the economy would grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs. This would generate approximately $500 – 600 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity.
At best, the growth and new revenue lags; it helps with the steady state cost, but you still have to deal with getting there.
> We currently spend over one trillion dollars on health care, incarceration, homelessness services and the like.
That's true (talking government spending) even if you cut out everything after health care, but...
> We would save $100 – 200 billion as people would take better care of themselves and avoid the emergency room, jail, and the street and would generally be more functional.
That's... extremely optimistic for a $1K UBI. Especially since much of the government cost of healthcare, which is the bulk of this category, is in means-tested programs, particularly Medicaid, which presumably was already fully counted when you counted the full cost of existing “welfare” programs.
- Over half of means-tested welfare (including Medicaid) goes to people under the age of 18, so these costs won't be touched. "In an average month during 2012, 39.2% of children received some type of means-tested benefit, compared with 16.6% of people aged 18 to 64 and 12.6% of people 65 years and older." The median monthly benefit for these groups was $447, $393, and $303 respectively. The only means tested program that isn't dominated by minors is SSI, the vast majority of which goes to the elderly and people 18 to 64 with disabilities who would not re-enter the workforce. [2, p16, 24]
[1] http://rooseveltinstitute.org/modeling-macroeconomic-effects... [2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
(5-6bn in welfare cuts) +
(8bn in vat) +
(5-6bn in magic economic growth) +
(1-2bn in cutting stuff he doesn't really elaborate on) =
(1.8-2.1trn).
So even if all his fantastic predictions come true we're still short of the 3.1 trillion to give 1k UBI checks to all ~260m adult Americans.
Regardless of his purported numbers he's still banking on massive economic growth happening at the same time as a massive tax increase. This is next-level voodoo economics.
We (at least, public direct aid programs; food banks etc., may pick up some of the slack) do now if people squander welfare, why would UBI change that?
Well, exactly the opposite, but sure.
> Yang's assumption that we'll be able to scrap welfare program if we give people UBI is a fantasy. Because UBI won't change the fact that many people are still going to need welfare, UBI or not.
No, your idea that we will be compelled to double cover against because some people might not use their first-line benefits ideally is fantasy, because people not doing that happens now and we are fine not double covering.
Replacing welfare with UBI isn't going to happen, we will end up paying for both.
When my family was on food stamps, if we mismanaged our money and food stamps one month (spent them too inefficiently, accidentally let some food spoil, or such), then, yes, society would absolutely have let us starve (though not in the streets, as we did own our house and were in a rural area). We might have been able to get some further help from family or friends, but not from any form of welfare.
Yes, just as much as we do now if they resell (e.g., for drugs) or squander their food stamps. Or, for perhaps a more perfect parallel, the same as the existing system does for anyone who had the income or assets to fail to qualify for means-tested benefits in the first place but fails to use them to meet their basic needs.
> Again, you're not seeing the fact that welfare often comes in the form of services, which the welfare receipts can't waste.
The things that directly stop people from starving in the streets are cash aid and aid that purchases food, neither of which are proof against recipient waste.
There are other forms of means-tested aid (largely, by dollar value, Medicaid) which are harder to misdirect, but UBI plus a default (with premium) public health insurance plan that you can opt-out of the purchasing a qualified private plan (a no B.S. individual mandate rather than a pay-a-small-fine one) handles that.
> I guess someone could try to seell soup they get at a soup kitchen
Soup kitchens aren't means tested public welfare, they are generally private charity, and are usually means-tested only in that people with any other options don't go.
So the plan is to pass one of the biggest tax hikes in US history (probably the biggest one during peace time) and then keeping our fingers crossed hoping for rapid, consistent economic growth following said massive tax increase. I think I'll pass.
That "tax hike" would almost all get spent, and probably pretty quickly, because the overwhelming majority of it would be going to people who live close enough to hand-to-mouth that the differences are academic.
So is that pulling $3T/year out of the economy or pumping most of $3T/year into it?
Step 1. Pass 3T worth of taxes and spending cuts.
Step 2. Give everyone $1k a month.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Poverty disappears, the economy grows by leaps and bounds.
It's a utopian vision. Tantalizing, yes I can empathize with people who like it. But let's not forget that Utopia comes from the Greek words "not" and "place". A utopia is something we all desire but does not exist. The pursuit of which has led many societies to ruin.
If we're going to premise the "health" of our economy in no small part on the movement of monkey status points, then move the things.
It's "trickle-up", not "trickle-down"...
Which is fantasy. It's not people paying the taxes it's a VAT that Yang's advocating for. This is money directly coming out of economic activity.
Have a nice day.
There's nothing automagical about it. It's plainly obvious, and unreasonable to assume the opposite.
Then there's the little matter that the money comes from somewhere. Moving $3T from one pocket to another may not result in any growth at all. (Ironically, if Yang were irresponsible, and weren't going to pay for this program, then this objection would not apply.)
It just seems absurd to me to think "may not result in any growth at all". Money in the hands of the poor and middle class moves faster than money in the hands of the rich, and thus creates more actual business. This is a well-understood economic fact.
> All economic growth comes from money moving somewhere.
No. No it doesn't. All real economic growth comes from more things that people want being produced. It results in money moving somewhere, but the money moving isn't the real growth, nor is it the cause. It's the result.
To adapt an explanation from Thomas Sowell, take beach houses. There's more demand for beach houses than there is supply, so they tend to be very expensive. I can't afford one - I can only rent. But if we gave everybody a bunch of money, there still wouldn't be any more beach houses. All that would happen is that beach houses would rise in price, because now there would be more money chasing the same beach houses.
This misunderstanding - thinking about money instead of about producing things - leads to the idea that you can cause growth by moving money around. Sometimes you can - when the demand is actually there, and the economy has the capacity to produce more. Well, in this situation (UBI), the demand is definitely there. The poor genuinely need stuff, lots of it. But even so, adding more money won't cause the economy to produce more unless it has the spare capacity. All it might do is redistribute the things that are already being produced. (And that may be fine. If we want to say that the poor shouldn't starve just because they're poor, and that the rich are going to have to make do with less so that the poor don't starve, there's a case to be made for that. But that's not the same as growth.)
So the question might be, how much spare capacity do you think there is in the economy, and why do you think that?
Sowell's example is woefully incomplete. He's talking only of limited, unique physical goods. He's not talking about things where production can increase in response to demand. He's not talking about services. And bluntly, UBI isn't there to help people buy beach houses, and won't cause enough inflationary pressure on beach houses to make a damn bit of difference on their price. It's there to help people afford a car, or child care, or medical bills, or any of the countless things that plague the poor rabble in this country.
Spare productive capacity is why UBI is feasible in the first place. The economy is producing more than people can afford to buy, and the machinery that makes it so productive is displacing jobs they need to afford anything at all.
If you're reading Sowell, you should read Yang's book. He addresses this stuff. He's not just treating UBI as a golden hammer. It's a straightforward, workable way to cope with a lot of problems that keep us from coping with other problems.
If technological advances wipe out 10% or more of existing jobs in the next couple of decades with no replacements in sight, what do we do? Blame them for being lazy? Retrain those truck drivers as computer programmers so they can get those hot programming jobs in their population 800 midwestern town? And move those local startups into the strip mall that closed because retail got wiped out by Amazon? If we don't do something about it, there will be blood in the streets, sooner or later. That's a much bigger problem than taxes.
Of course there is. You can have an economy without money. It's barter, but it's still an economy, and it can still have growth.
And, of course UBI isn't for buying beach houses. That was to illustrate the problem in an obvious way, not to be directly relevant.
> The economy is producing more than people can afford to buy
You have also claimed that UBI will grow the economy. If it's already producing more than people can afford to buy, first, why would it grow the economy, and second, why should we regard that as a good thing?
Since you seem to be misreading my position fairly consistently, let me try to be more clear. My claim is not that UBI is necessarily a bad thing. My claim is not that UBI is unneeded. My claim is not that the poor are doing fine. My claim is that your claim that UBI will grow the economy is highly suspect.
Ok, let's take this from another angle. Does bankruptcy at a large scale help the economy? Foreclosure? Homelessness? It seems reasonable to me that people are more likely to contribute to the economy if they aren't bankrupt and homeless. It seems likely that their children are more likely to become successful contributors.
And it's obvious that UBI can reduce these problems substantially. After all, homelessness isn't caused by a shortage of homes. It's caused by financial distribution problems. So right there, we have an opportunity for growth.
Now, I'm not arguing that UBI will totally pay for itself here either. But it seems likely to produce some economic growth, just because it does the most for the people currently least able to participate in the economy, and that's a majority of the population.
And why do you think it answers anything I have said?
And your claim, which is nonsense, is that the VAT will eat 100% of that $12k.
It would be paid for by a value added tax of 10%.
If you said to Democrats that they could have UBI, but only for citizens, would they go for that? Is someone who is a legal resident to be left to starve (or work 80 hour weeks to survive) just because they aren't a citizen? How about if they're an illegal alien?
If you said to Democrats that they could have UBI, including for non-citizen residents, but at the price of genuinely securing the border, would they go for that?
But the flip side might also be interesting. If you told Republicans that they could have a genuinely secure border, at the price of UBI, would they go for it?
A crisis makes radical solutions easier. And if Yang is right about what is going to happen to the economy over the next couple of decades, crisis is what we'll have.
And his look to the recent past, rather than the future, isn't speculative - it's fact-based. When he points out that half the laid-off manufacturing workers wind up never returning to the workforce, many on "disability" that is becoming a long-term unemployment system rather than its original intent, he's quoting statistics. To reject his conclusions in a valid manner, one must either challenge his facts, or provide alternative interpretations of the observed facts. (Of course, most won't bother with a valid rejection, and instead just wave their hands around and shout louder about how we're going to train 50 year old truck drivers to be software engineers or whatever.)
Even where Yang is speculating, his speculation seems pretty reasonable. Making trucks drive themselves rather than needing a human for the steering and brakes and situational awareness isn't exactly an NP-hard problem. The odds that Amazon etc will continue to eat into retail seems reasonable to me. These things add up to millions of jobs lost, with no equal-paying replacements in the pipeline for those workers. And it's not just "blue collar" work... what happens to paralegals, for example? There are a lot of jobs that people go to college for, taking on tens of thousands in debt, that might just disappear in the course of a few years.
What the hell are we going to do about that? Tell them to get their lazy asses back to work? Because that's the current solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_...
Why it might pass? First UBI is popular with independents. Second, if Yang becomes president, thats some damn strong signaling to Congress to support UBI.
A federal UBI bill? An outside possibility, if the right person was President and pushing for it.
Yang’s UBI concept specifically, zero, and anyone making it a centerpiece of their campaign would get roasted as soon as any opposing candidate (or interest group) took it seriously enough to bother looking for holes to poke in it.
The big kicker in a Democratic primary: not only is it a huge budget busting expenditure, but it's a huge budget busting expenditure even after accounting all existing welfare as an available funding source, and yet it is often worse for poor families than existing welfare. In a number of states, the benefit level proposed a household with a single adult with two kids would be less than TANF + SNAP (not even counting housing subsidies and other available benefits) are now.
(Yang does say current beneficiaries would have a choice with UBI, but the cost and funding doesn't seem to reflect that; if you do that, the cost goes up even more, for the retained welfare benefits and administrative bureaucracy.)
> He can want it and push it all day long but if the support from congress isn't there (which it frankly isn't currently), what are the chances it will become reality?
To be fair, 100% of the House and 1/3 of the Senate will be elected along with the next President; if a President making UBI a campaign centerpiece is elected (a big “if”), there's a reasonable chance a more favorable Congress will be, too.
> Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue says the administration thinks these people should be able to get jobs, especially now that the nation's unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in years.
> "People believe that able-bodied people who can work, should work," Tennessee Republican Rep. Scott Desjarlais told Perdue, "Do you have any idea why there might be so much pushback and concerns on this measure?"
> "I have no clue," Perdue responded.
I don't see how we get from there to: "Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a form of social security that guarantees a certain amount of money to every citizen within a given governed population, without having to pass a test or fulfill a work requirement."[3] Fox News can't even discuss UBI without dismissing it out of hand with contempt and mockery[4].
We've got a ways to go to get back even to GWB's "compassionate conservatism," much less a serious discussion of UBI.
I realize how pessimistic I seem. I'm actually pretty excited by some of the current candidates. I think a couple of the candidates[5] have it right when they argue our first priority has to be to restore democracy to the political process[6] and that the way to sell that to Americans is with the notion of fairness.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
2. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/01/707681965/more-than-750-000-c...
3. https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReYGzsqQ12M
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtNcRLAlmuI
6. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1
My assumption
1. Yang knows that he little chance to win the nom
2. Yang is running so that his ideas enter mainstream convo (successful already due to JRE's massive influence) and the eventual nominee may incorporate them in their platform in some manner
3. He possibly gains enough early steam that he could be a VP candidate or in the administration which helps accomplish goal #2
If I could relive my narrow miss for student council president (long before the Chicxulub crater), spraying positions everywhere like that would be the first thing I'd avoid repeating.
The blank slate is more high risk high reward I guess.
It showed me how much of an uphill climb Yang has to even get name recognition. I'd like to see any American to walk into any coffee shop and ask, "Hey, so what do you think of Andrew Yang?" and see what kind of name recognition he really has. If these top MBA candidates from top schools who were so enthusiastic for discussing Democratic candidates did not recognize him, who would?
As much as we might make fun of MBAs, I imagine them to still be more plugged in than average as to what's happening in the world, especially if they're Ivy Leaguers? Or does Andrew Yang really have good name recognition, and I just got unlucky in running into posers who have no idea about anything? Or are people really just not that plugged in after all?
I'm not really convinced this is a solid assumption.
UBI is widely popular among liberals (and libertarians), and the other candidates aren't even mentioning it. That's how Yang is getting a lot of interest and traction in Iowa and NH. And it helps that he has some characteristics that sell well in the retail-politics, highly personal world of IA/NH primary politics. He comes across as a pretty ordinary and totally sincere person, and those things always sell well. (Source: I lived in Iowa through four presidential campaigns.)