Comments by "Jeremy Barlow" (@jeremybarlow2291) on "Why You Shouldn't Buy What Andrew Yang is Selling" video.

Imposing a VAT is also a stealth way to implement a highly regressive sales tax that hurts workers and the poor more than any offset by UBI. It squeezes the middle class much harder! I knew there was a reason I always liked you Jordan and the reason is more than anyone else you get it and are skeptical of everyone. No one gets a pass. They all have to earn trust through actions. I also find it interesting that industrial agriculture in the Midwest is earning farmers in Illinois with the best soil on earth $244 an acre, while labor intensive small scale farming in Upstate NY on a five acre farm with multiple crops planted a year in the same beds and multiple harvests per year in regions with much harsher climates in terms of winter and a much shorter growing season can make a 5 acre farm earn $60k per acre or $300k per year. That farm has a 1/10 the carbon footprint of big Ag and Feeds 10x the calories per acre per year. It requires dramatically more labor and uses hand tools and fire weeding and routine pruning and re-planting which all requires a lot more thinking laborers, but that 5 acre farm which employs 10 people is putting $30k a year in each worker’s pocket. Which isn’t great money, but it’s a solid working class income. It is also exactly the kind of intensively productive farming that reduces carbon emissions per pound of food which we must have to fight there climate crisis.
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Zach Davis anyone who has studied economics thoroughly and examined multiple points of view knows that UBI as Yang proposes is a boon for the rich and powerful and fucks the working class!
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Mark Simpson it has been tested 29 times and every single time the conclusion was that it hurts the economy and does little to help the people it is supposed to help.
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Cozimo I spent 20 years studying economics, the law, and public policy. I attended the #1 school in the world on public administrations. I’ve started companies. I’ve worked in the public sector. I’ve managed Congressional campaigns. I’ve worked in Hollywood. I’ve read Yang’s proposals and I’ve spent enough time researching and ruminating on the issue to know he is just flat out wrong. I don’t have to justify my reasoning to you. You have to sell me on why his ideas are good. I ain’t buying them!
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joan anthony oh you don’t have to tell me. For the last three days I’ve been catching hell on Twitter for comments I made on a Kyle Kulinski tweet pointing out the fact that Yang is full of shit and a member of the oligarchy advancing the oligarchy’s agenda. I also pointed out the math doesn’t add up. To implement and pay for his plan would require a $3 trillion VAT which would consume 50% of wages and salaries according to Social Security tax numbers they are about $7-$8 trillion annually. This would steal every penny from the working class. It would make working entirely worthless.
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Status Coup yeah people who don’t understand that the reason the economy grew under Eisenhower was that you could pay 90 cents in tax and increase the public wealth or you could pay 10 cents in wages and avoid paying 90 cents in taxes and grow your businesses and build assets and create real wealth for you, so you hired more workers, gave generous raises, took out high interest loans for capital improvements, rented equipment and facilities, and invested in R&D to make yourself richer. Then Reagan came along and doing the opposite made sense. They don’t understand the basics of why and how taxes and economics work. It is depressing.
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Cal Bear I support the original Green New Dealer Howie Hawkins because his policies will fundamentally restructure the economy into worker owned democracies.
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Win1@atime Howie Hawkins co-founded the Green Party USA in 1984. In the 1970s he and Sanders worked together to build the Liberty Union Party in Vermont. Howie was the first to propose a Green New Deal when he ran for NY Governor in 2010. Hawkins Green New Deal fundamentally shifts the structure of ownership of the enterprise in the USA. First it converts all utilities to consumer/worker owned cooperatives. Second it provides government grants to retrofit homes and commercial buildings for energy efficiency with better insulation, doors, windows, and efficient lighting, geothermal and solar thermal heating and hot water, as well as converting the energy grid to renewable resources. The Hawkins Green New Deal also provides contract incentives for worker owned cooperatives to get these grant based contracts with bidding advantages for All grant and general government contracts. This will include contracts for the manufacture of solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, as well as research and development for clean energy fusion technologies and the like. Hawkins Green New Deal provides incentives for manufacturers of public transportation and commercial vehicles to utilize worker owned cooperatives in the supply chain as manufacturers. The same Hawkins Green New Deal supports a federal jobs guarantee that will fill many of those jobs by funding the creation of worker owned cooperative enterprise to rebuild infrastructure. The Hawkins National Health Service plan is superior to Medicare for All in that it will nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, we already pay for 98% of primary medical research through the CDC and the NIH, so why are we subsidizing corporations, and reorganize them as consumer/worker owned cooperatives with consumers having co-equal voting power with the workers who manufacture the medicines. It will nationalize hospitals and reorganize them as worker/consumer owned cooperative enterprises as well. Hawkins’ plans fundamentally reshape America into a worker owned democracy and that is what I support more than anything else. The collateral benefits of his plans are a much cleaner environment, a healthcare system that cares for everyone. And a much more productive and efficient society where the workers own the means of production and control the economy.
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Brad Taylor no I actually don’t support the UBI at all its a bad idea.
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Brad Taylor it makes it easier for oligarchs to strip away the power of the economic weapons the working class uses against it.
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SeaRose you can tell people how many employees to hire through tax policy. Eisenhower did it and the economy grew like wildfire!
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This^^^^ so much this ^^^. Democracy in the Workplace and laws outlawing wage slavery in all forms are the best solution. Worker ownership is the future which prevents the bad outcomes.
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elsa Grace I was literally the attorney for the Department of Social Services in my home county for 2 years. Here is a link to a video about an upstate NY farm making $350k a year from 1.5 acres. So you are right. That is chump change for intensive Ag farms! https://youtu.be/u5IE6lYKXRw
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JG135 $2k per month in expenses would make it a wash even if you paid $0 in income or social security taxes. If you were paying typical income and social security taxes it would be a wash at about $1500 a month. To cover $3 trillion in new spending would require a VAT that would consume roughly 50% of every dollar of wages and salaries earned in the USA. There quite simply are not enough luxury goods purchased to pay for it.
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JG135 to pay the expenses of a UBI for 250 million Americans over 18 which is where we are according to the census bureau you would spend $3 trillion paying the UBI. To pay that much on top of the almost $4 trillion annual budget running a $1 trillion deficits no matter what Yang claims about a 10% VAT it would actually need to be 50% to pay for the expense. According to the Social Security Administration you have between $7 trillion and $8 trillion in wages and salaries paid annually. My numbers come from KNOWING these things off the top of my head and being able to do basic math about big numbers quickly by knowing some of these important statistics. My numbers don’t come from reading a candidate’s bullshit propaganda; but being able to think and reason for myself!
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Dalton Bedore because we have the historical math. We invested in free tuition essentially for all after World War II and the GAO watched the numbers for decades. The GI Bill participants who took the benefit returned $7 per dollar spent more to the treasury than was spent in added earnings above and beyond the people who didn’t take the benefit. That is tax dollars which means they grew GDP by about $28 for every dollar invested versus the counterparts who did not partake in GI Bill benefits like my grandfathers. We also have the numbers for universal healthcare. It would save the US on average $6k per year per person versus what we spend today for worse care. That is based on the Woolhandler study.
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Mike Pardus failing to realize that there is a better way to address the issue than a UBI, a series of changes which I actually support, a regulatory framework that allows only for libertarian socialism and worker/consumer owned democratic workplaces while outlawing wage slavery and the fact that I support Howie Hawkins Green New Deal for a reason, not the least of which is that a fundamental reorganizing of society in such a way that products and services from nations that do not end wage slavery and protect workers rights along with providing rigorous environmental protections, and that I understand high top marginal tax rates and other mechanisms which encourage widespread participation in the upside and the fact that understanding why those 1950s solutions worked and that there are other methods of regulating an economy oligarchs like Yang want you to believe cannot be configured to prevent monopolies or the consolidation of power by monopolies which is what the Sherman Antitrust Act was actually designed to prevent is the problem. You presume that a piece of the puzzle is my answer, when in fact it is just a piece.
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The Everyday Progressive Show I think Social Security needs a massive overhaul too. As does the entire system. We don’t need to do a version 3.0 of our systems. We need an entire scrap and rebuild with a fresh set of plans like Mac OSX in the late 1990s completely gutted the original OS and took NEXT’s OS as a basis. Or how Final Cut X was a line one re-write of Final Cut. Would such a rebuild be 100% smooth? No, but we have a lot of better ideas that can’t be tried without a full reboot.
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Honey Badger I could make up false numbers too. I did the back of the envelope math. It would take $3 trillion to pay for UBI as Yang proposes if it is a UBI for adults. That means his VAT would need to confiscate about 50% of all wages and salaries in the US just to pay for it. That is on top of the 50% of salaries and wages already taken in taxes. Based on the numbers from Social Security, wages and salaries in the US are somewhere between $7-$8 trillion annually. So no thanks, the math does not work!
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