Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Andrew Yang Leaves Democratic Party To Hang With Tucker Carlson" video.

Those of us who tried to warn everyone about Tulsi and Yang have definitely been vindicated and then some.
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I remember quite a few of them trying to insist to me that Yang was the biggest lefty in the race despite running on a rehashed Milton Friedman proposal that he managed to make even worse.
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@NoahBenjamin-q5f So, he wants people to "move forward" by eliminating the existing social safety net and replacing something that he admits is insufficient, treats the poor and disabled as second-class citizens, wants a regressive tax, and would lead us to a world with a few trillionaires and everyone else scraping by on less than the poverty level? If this is forward, send me backward any day of the week.
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Maybe Krystal Ball taught him how to set up a Scam PAC. She has quite a bit of experience.
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@CUPCAKE0809 One is a grifter, and one is preparing to become a grifter.
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UBI is neither left or right. Everything depends on how it is structured. His version was a regressive benefit (the poor and disabled had to give up their existing benefits in order to pay for it) paid for by a regressive tax. He took a Milton Friedman idea and managed to make it worse.
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@SportsZombie54 He also said that "Amazon would have to pay for every purchase," which was a ridiculous notion, because every study has shown that any consumption tax in any form gets completely passed onto the consumer. Do you consider books to be a luxury item? I don't. If it is only on luxury goods, it is by definition not a VAT, and it isn't enough to raise $2.5T. A VAT is a broad-based tax. The existing social safety net should not be either/or. Making people give up their existing benefits is the very definition of a right-wing UBI. The key distinction is whether or not is in addition to or instead of the existing benefits. Robert Reich proposed one that doesn't take away what people already get. There are some needs that are specific and acute, and a UBI is wholly inadequate to address them. Why force people in that situation to choose? Example: Of the few that he was willing to specify, Yang mentioned daycare subsidies. Imagine a single parent with two small children making $20,000/year. Since Yang doesn't support increasing the minimum wage, this is entirely feasible. Daycare for two kids is $1500/month. Therefore, it is either take the subsidy or quit the job. Since the former is clearly the best option, you are now making that person pay extra for goods, thus making his/her position worse in absolute dollars, and worse in relative dollars, because the friends from the job who don't have small children are now getting more money to spend. How is this progressive?
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@SportsZombie54 Yang didn't say directly that the choice was permanent (he had a problem with giving direct answers on specifics), but when Rubin asked why not just get rid of the existing social safety net now, Yang said that as more people opt into his system, the existing system will start to wither, or as Grover Norquist said, shrink it to the size that you can drown it in the bathtub. It was coded, but it was there.
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@drcurran235 You want a few examples that prove that Andrew Yang is trash? 1) He opposes increasing taxes on the rich and wants a regressive consumption tax instead. 2) He is indifferent to hostile toward labor. 3) He supports tech monopolies buying up everything to make even more monopolies. 4) He insisted that his thousand bucks a month would help people move for global warming because we should just give up. 5) He never provided a full list of the 125 either/or programs for his Freedom with Strings Attached Dividend. 6) He treated the poor and disabled as second-class citizens, including at one point wanting to make VA Disability benefits either/or. 7) He said one thing to lefty audiences and another to right wingers. 8) He repeatedly lied about his signature issue, because a) he didn't want to give everyone $1000/month, and b) he said it was tax free, but it was paid for with a VAT, which not only disproportionately affects the poor, but also affects people who wouldn't have gotten a penny from the Freedom with 125 Strings Attached Dividend. And that's not even getting into his dumpster fire mayoral campaign.
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So, you liked a regressive benefit (the poor and disabled had to give up their existing benefits to get his money) paid for by a regressive tax? May I ask why?
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@SportsZombie54 Funny that the rich get to keep all of their tax breaks under his plan. It is regressive because the poor and disabled are the only ones who have to give something up. If they're better off in the existing social safety net, they now have to pay a VAT to fund something that they aren't getting. How is this anything other than regressive? And if it is such a fair choice, why not give a full list of the 125 programs that were either/or? And how long does that choice last? When talking to Dave Rubin, he implied that once you took the Freedom with 125 Strings Attached Dividend, you were forever opting out of the existing social safety net. If so, people had better hope he was wrong about computers taking all the jobs.
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@SportsZombie54 I only watched clips. The only Rubin Report I ever watched in its entirety was the Marianne Williamson interview, and that gentle yet brutal takedown was a thing of beauty.
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@SportsZombie54 And you don't think that the demonization would be worse if the people getting existing benefits can't get the Freedom with 125 Strings Attached Dividend?
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@SportsZombie54 By definition, Yang doesn't want to do it the right way. He told Ben Shapiro that the reason why it wasn't more is "the magic of a thousand bucks a month is that it is below the poverty level for one person, which forces people to work in order to live any life of meaning." The emphasis was his. He wants to use it as a Trojan horse to gut benefits for the people who really need it. Why did you ignore my example of someone making $20,000/year with two small children in daycare? He is making life objectively worse for those people. Stop just regurgitating talking points, and actually engage the points about what he actually wanted to do and the details.
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@SportsZombie54 You know what seems silly to me? Offering everyone $1000/month except the people who need it most, and making those people pay a regressive tax.
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Funny that the MATH guy clearly doesn't understand how math works.
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@greenith He never made the argument that immigration was good to Republican audiences. If it ever came up to them, he dog whistled and reminded them that only citizens could get it, which they heard loud and clear as a way of discouraging immigration. And what lefty policies was he selling? His UBI was a version of a Milton Friedman proposal with a regressive tax as the cherry on top.
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@greenith Apparently, you don't know the definition of a regressive tax. If the poor pay a higher percentage of their income than the rich do, it is a regressive tax. Consumption taxes are literally the textbook example of a regressive tax. Again, Yang says different things to different groups depending on who he thinks is listening. For example, he told lefty audiences that he wanted to use the Freedom with 125 Strings Attached Dividend to reduce poverty and to deal with automation taking jobs. However, he emphasized to Ben Shapiro that (this thing that he told Dave Rubin was a politically feasible way to eliminate the existing social safety net) was below the poverty level (and described it as "magical") because it would force people to work. Give it enough time, and you can find him arguing three sides to every issue.
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@greenith English translation: It is too hard to make rich people pay taxes, so let's make poor people pay it instead.
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@greenith The rich aren't paying the VAT. I don't care what the theory is, I care about the facts. The closest to a VAT in America are sales taxes (which just involve fewer steps). My adopted home state exempts staple goods, and the poorest 20% still pay nearly ten times what the richest 1% do as a percentage of income. The rate is 6% statewide with an extra 1% in Pittsburgh and an extra 2% in Philadelphia. The richest 1% pay less than 1% of income, so how in the world would this be "a wealth transfer from the rich"?
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@cqtaylor And that's why, to me, the only two logical conclusions are that she is either stupid or insincere. I don't think she is stupid. She knows exactly what she is doing. She still harbors a grudge for getting fired by MSNBC, and that fuels everything she does.
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His "only good idea" was really bad once you read past the elevator pitch.
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@silenceyouidiot His signature proposal is right wing. He is a libertarian.
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@Db8nIsStupid The VAT was the "regressive tax" I mentioned above in the first comment. You clearly understood the regressive benefit criticism. As far as UBI goes, I am not opposed to the idea if it is done the right way in terms of distribution (i.e., not an excuse to gut the existing social safety net) and is not being used an excuse to ignore the systemic issues that we need to address. UBI by itself is only a Band-Aid, and things like Medicare for All, paid college tuition, and affordable housing are more important.
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@lottiea7 Not sure what happened to my original comment. I guess they're cracking down on providing links. I don't care who does it. That doesn't make it any less regressive a tax. Exempting certain staple goods can only make an inherently regressive tax less regressive. My adopted home state exempts staple goods such as groceries, clothing, medicine, and diapers from the sales tax, and the richest 20% still pay nearly ten times what the richest 1% do as a percentage of income. Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, "Pennsylvania: Who Pays? 6th Edition"
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@lottiea7 It is impossible to make a consumption tax progressive. It is the literal textbook example of a regressive tax. Seriously, Google regressive tax definition, and consumption taxes are almost always the first example that comes up. Fifty years ago, the effective tax rate was twice as high for the top 400 families. The difference? The IRS wasn't gutted and instructed to spend most of its time going after EITC filers. Letting some of the money slip through the cracks is a small price to pay in order to make sure that the poor don't have to bear the burden. You are working backwards to try to justify something rather than actually looking and admitting that, just maybe, consumption taxes are horrible, and we moved away from them as our primary revenue source for a reason.
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@lottiea7 Study after study has shown that the costs get passed onto consumers for a VAT. The only functional difference between it and a sales tax is that it has more steps. Brookings did a study, and they found that all costs of a VAT are passed onto the consumer. This is not the case at all for corporate income taxes, where shareholders bear most of the cost.
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@cqtaylor She formed a PAC that was supposed to elect lefty candidates and ended up enriching herself and stiffing the candidates. She wrote a book arguing for a red/brown alliance that argued that Bernie and Trump had more in common than the "establishment." In 2020. She laughed off the coup attempt. With friends like her, who needs enemies?
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@ShermThursby Well, a vet against wars she didn't like, but understood. She fooled a lot of people in 2016.
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@Db8nIsStupid I didn't mention his campaign funding proposal. I personally prefer the Clean Campaign model to Democracy Dollars, because his assumes that corporations won't just escalate. You specifically said "UBI + VAT," and you sidestepped the question about the VAT. His version of UBI is horrible, and his funding proposal is even worse.
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@Db8nIsStupid The Clean Campaign model was what was used in several states (Maine and Arizona went first in the 1990s). I'm not sure if the Roberts Court undermined in its effort to gut campaign finance laws. The way it worked was that there was a public fund. If a candidate agreed to only collect money from the fund except for possibly a small loan of less than $1000 for seed money to build a campaign apparatus, candidates had to collect a certain amount of five dollar donations (say, 100 for a state legislative race) in order to demonstrate viability. If they did that, they would get a campaign chest comparable to winning campaigns. If an opponent opted out and raised more money than the threshold, the clean candidates would get matching funds. That way, next to no time spent dialing for dollars and being more responsive to constituents.
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