Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Caller Calls Out Andrew Yang's UBI Plan" video.

@NoWay1969 Then, that is a huge problem with his version of UBI. The left version of UBI argues that automation will make full employment or anything near full employment impossible, so you need to have enough to live on so 90% of the population isn't impoverished. When Yang talked about automation, I liked what he was saying because I thought that this was what he was leading to. The right/libertarian version is designed to replace existing benefits. Making people choose who work and don't make enough to make ends meet between funds while people like himself still get the $1000 check is grossly obscene. I haven't heard him say anything about increasing the minimum wage, so he's not trying to make jobs work for people, just pointing to the (not so universal) $1000/month.
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@NoWay1969 And the payment method is a huge problem. Consumption taxes disproportionately affect the poor, which is why candidates amd elected officials with actual left credentials (Bernie, Warren, AOC) all propose paying for their programs with taxes on those with the most disposable income: Bernie with higher income tax brackets, financial transaction taxes, and increased inheritance taxes; Warren with taxes on those with assets of $50MM or more (side note: I wonder how many people will disappear from the Forbes list); and AOC supports increasing the top bracket to 70%.
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@NoWay1969 Well, he does talk about it as something that everyone can get, but then he says that it's optional for people who get governmental assistance. As I and others have pointed out, this is a huge problem with his version of UBI. Since not everyone gets it, it's not even accurate to call it UBI. Another consequence of the Freedom Dividend is that it may very well keep wages down. "After all, you get an extra thousand bucks a month tax free, so why should I pay you so much?" This is why those on the left have argued that any effective UBI a) has to actually be universal, rather than reverse means tested like Yang's proposal, and b) be high enough that someone could actually live off of that amount to give workers leverage. As far as funding, if that is his answer for why consumption should be taxed instead of income or wealth, if he really is worried about companies avoiding taxes, why not get rid of the loopholes that help them avoid taxes in the first place? The more I hear about Yang, the more I think that he's a libertarian stalking horse.
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@NoWay1969 Indeed, but a lot of the details that I have seen don't really address poverty (because the payment is too small to do that) or inequality (because he refuses to tax the wealthy on order to pay for it). I do worry that he does see it as a way to phase out or drastically reduce existing benefits, because the either/or nature of his plan is one of the ways that he plans on paying for it, because on his website, he mentions reduced payments on existing benefits as one of the ways that he plans to pay for it. In one interview, he talks about it as a way to help people start a business, but I have had long stretches of unemployment while in grad school (where I was ineligible for most assistance programs because I was in school), and that kind of money wouldn't have done such a thing for me, because it would have been going toward basic expenses. I could also point to the deep, deep flaws in his proposal on college tuition, because he doesn't adjust it for things like the poverty level, so it would actually be worse than some existing repayment programs.
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@imavileone7360 Oh, I agree. The irony is that UBI has some weird left-right overlap, and by focusing almost entirely on this one issue, he made it easy to hide his real economic orientation. I just hope that most of the people who aren't cultists will see the truth about him in a couple of months, and he's just as dismissed an afterthought as the Paul family.
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@imavileone7360 I've come to realize that he is a libertarian wolf in leftist clothing. Hopefully, people ask him follow up questions in the first debate, considering that libertarians already put their money down and he's qualified.
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