It solves a huge amount for the poorest among us. For starters the number of people actually receiving benefits is quite small. The stereotypical single mother on food stamps + housing assistance + medicaid + welfare gets more than 1000 in benefits a month, but her children's father gets 0 or very close usually.

It doesn't target the people already receiving significant public benefits as hard, this is true. At the same time those people often live in fear of accidentally making too much money and losing their benefits. The Freedom dividend being income agnostic is actually a hugely positive development for most people receiving benefits if they decide to try to improve their situation even a little bit.

Also I don't think medicaid gets cancelled for UBI. Particularly since Yang is for a public option which would presumably have massive subsidies for people poor enough to get all those benefits.

I don’t see a UBI happening any time soon. VAT is a different story. I don’t see it not happening and fairly soon. The government needs to increase revenues and imposing a VAT is the likely compromise between the Republicans and Democrats, with the Republicans keeping relatively low income tax rates in exchange for the Democrats getting more social spending.

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Disclaimer: Youtubes and stuff, but video claims that $1.5T is spent on various welfare programs. I find it very very hard to believe cutting each citizen a check for $33k/year would be worse than all the social programs in the country.

https://youtu.be/OQjrhIyaPyg?t=719

Most of the conservatives I know (who have an opinion) favor income taxes over a VAT. They believe that while income taxes are less efficient (because they penalize income rather than consumption), they also lead to higher taxes in total since it the VAT tax is easier to increase than income taxes.

Have you ever heard a political speech before? Lowering income taxes, free healthcare, free education, cutting corporate taxes, refusing to try to fix social security, increasing the amount of time one can be on unemployment and increasing the dollar amount of it and increasing minimum wage are just some of the ideas politicians have used over the last 50+ years to attempt to bribe people for votes.

I think yang's timing is terrible as he is pitching this at a time when unemployment it is at a historic how. Note that he talks about manufacturing and other specific industries losing jobs while ignoring the super low unemployment rate. Giving everyone $1k/mo is equal to drastically lowering taxes on the poor and unless he is planning on just having the government go more into debt he will likely raise taxes on the rich - aka: this is a standard democrat idea.

Many of my professors have paraphrased some original saying somewhere, and I am paraphrasing them again

Democrats don’t want the VAT because they think it doesn’t work. Republicans don’t want the VAT because they think it works too well.

I'm interested in hearing what those of you who think it's bad think we should do about the fact that the bottom 60% of families are doing VERY poorly relative to the top 40%?

Huge swaths of the population are, to put it mildly, not sharing in the economies gains. How would you suggest that we fix that?

And that's just today. This trend is getting worse right now not better. It's getting to a point where the cost of basic stuff like housing, education, and healthcare are close to out of reach for the majority of the population.

Ray Dalio, who is pretty obviously better at macroeconomics than anyone in this subforum (I'd argue he's the best on planet Earth period based on his results over time) seems to think that if capitalism doesn't get reformed it's going to die. We're all seeing the populism level rise basically every day, so his view on this is probably pretty close to correct. How do we solve that as a society so that capitalism doesn't die?

By the way, thinking that you're better at macroeconomics than Ray Dalio is an incredible data point that should be very concerning. If you think you're better than the provably best guy in the world you're very very attached to your ideology and aren't embracing reality in any way. If that doesn't worry you I don't know how to even have a conversation with you about it.

The bottom 50% of US taxpayers (taxpayers, not including the tens of millions not paying taxes) contribute 3% of federal income tax revenues. The remaining 97% is provided by the other half of taxpayers. You want to tax the upper half more, so the great majority of the US population is paying, say, 1% of the federal income taxes? If you're poor in this country, you get free school, free healthcare (Medicaid), free food (SNAP), housing assistance (section 8, etc.), free internet at libraries and Starbucks. What else do you want the poor to be entitled to?

I think Yang is right that eventually automation will create irremediable joblessness, and a UBI system will be a good solution, but he's way too early. Unemployment is super low, and UBI pilot programs show that people don't take the money and create great new products and services—they just quit their jobs and live frugally on the dole. Combine this with his other half-baked Pollyanna policies and lack of charisma, and you have someone polling at <1%.

Yeah they pay nearly nothing in taxes but that’s because they make nearly no money dude. That’s the problem. How do we fix that?

Our current system is the one that deserves credit for making sure the bottom 60% has the opportunity that they do. Compare the quality of life of our bottom 60% to every other countries bottom 60%.

Of course asset inequality is continuing to get worse. It is a guarantee that as long as you have a country that is growing and that is as free as the USA you will have a growing inequality. This only changes when the poor and middle class save more and invest less in things like cash, CDs, savings accounts, annuities and real estate which historical underperform the stock market.

I see no need to fix this “problem”. What is even the problem you are talking about? Do you want everyone to have the same amount of stuff?

Income and asset inequality has never and will never be a problem in a country as free as the US.

Your first point is simply not true when talking about people born after the Baby Boomers.

Ray Dalio disagrees strongly with you, and that's a good sign that your confidence about macroeconomics is wildly misplaced.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-b...ies-ray-dalio/

What you're saying in your post (whether you know it or like it is immaterial) is that you want the reality to conform to your world view and you're super happy to ignore it when it doesn't.

Why would anyone ever take you seriously?

Let's be super clear: the bottom 60% can't afford housing, healthcare, and education on what our 'free market' (where our economic system has largely promoted the consolidation of power in the hands of a small group of people who have used that power to set wages artificially low gradually reducing the share of the economy being paid to labor) pays them. Our society is getting steadily less and less 'free' by the day as those who have already won continue to progressively fix the economy in their own favor.

We live in the real world not some libertarian utopia. Libertarianism has quite a few excellent points to make (mostly around regulatory capture and the danger of government overreach, which is a major contributor to inequality whether the liberals in this thread like it or not), but like every ideology it's also significantly flawed with massive logic holes.

The system as it currently stands gives more benefits to people in the 50th to 90th percentile range than it does to those in the bottom 50th. Members of the lower percentiles in the US have lower incomes than those same percentiles in most developed countries. In fact by pretty much every measurable metric I can find the US rates poorly for standard of living compared to other developed countries. The idea that the system in the US is good for the bottom 60% relative to systems in other developed countries is just complete nonsense.

Obviously some level of inequality will always exist and that in itself is not a problem. It becomes a problem when it exists to the extent that people in the lower percentiles working full time jobs see essentially no change in real income over 30 years - resulting in many barely being able to afford the basic necessities to live - while the upper percentiles have seen huge increases. It is this inherent unfairness of income received relative to value created that is the underlying issue.

Make money expire after a year like a coupon. Use (share) it or lose it.

*Wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a rent-seeking, monetarist leech like Dalio to propose something like that, though.

Lol ok. So far we’ve got expiring money and straight denial no chaser. You guys are really coming through here.

People responding to your ignorant blathering have come through as a lot more reasonable than you on this topic. You sound like some 19-year-old in a Che shirt in this thread, and every counterpoint you deflect with the same whinging about how the poor people should have more money (because your virtuous morals tell you so). You completely dodged my post. The bottom 50% pay 3% of federal income taxes, and enjoy the redistribution of the other 97%. We have a safety net that gives lower earners and non-earners free food and healthcare and education and housing and internet and transportation. I think that's plenty, and gives a more comfortable life than 99% of people who ever lived on this planet have enjoyed, and they don't have to do **** to get it. Giving people more free things tends not to make them more productive—it tends to make them more dependent and entitled. If you think the top half of people should be paying 99% instead of 97%, fine, but don't act like people who disagree with you are being unreasonable or are morally inferior.

Yeah... 100% of the federal budget isn’t redistribution lol. You’re incredibly disingenuous. Is your point that people who make less than 15 bucks an hour who can’t afford housing, healthcare, or education should pay more in taxes? They already pay 14% between sales tax and payroll taxes plus state income tax in most places. They already have almost no disposable income lol.

I feel like you’re going to keep pretending there’s nothing wrong until the actual communists show up to take your stuff. I don’t want to wait. I want to contain the ‘eat the rich’ crowd before they invite themselves over to my house.

One more time: the most successful capitalists are all telling us something is broken. That’s not because they’re dirty socialists, it’s because something is wrong.

I ran some numbers and it appears that giving 200,000,000 people 1,000 a month will cost 2.4 trillion dollars. Where is that going to come from?

So your reasoning for expanding the social net beyond free school, healthcare, food, shelter, transportation, etc., is because this won't placate the communist militants who will soon be breaking down my door? And you think others in this thread aren't coming through?

By the way, no I don't think the poor should pay more taxes. I think our current social net that gives them everything they need to get educated and live safe, healthy lives is about right.

I tried asking BoredSocial a few times if he wants to raise taxes on the rich, who already pay hugely disproportionate and generous sums to give the disadvantaged all they need to get educated and live securely and move up, but he'd rather moralize and dodge than give me an answer.

Poor people don’t need more money. Poor people need more stuff. So either (a) we produce more consumer goods and give them to poor people or (b) take some consumer goods from those who have more and give them to those who have less.

Where's your ambition? If you shift the level of acceptable hardship to match the international poverty line you could basically scrap all social spending. (which still would probably be a higher quality of life than 99% of humans to have ever lived)

Answer to how will America pay for UBI aka The Freedom dividend . . .




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Yeah they don't need more 'stuff'. They need better education, healthcare, and housing options that fall inside their income. This is one of the really weird fallacies you keep hearing from the right, that because people have iphones everything is fine.

More consumer goods isn't worth much when you have no future because you aren't going to be employable in 10 years.

The wealthiest own basically everything. The top 5 people own more wealth than the bottom 50%. As a % of their income they pay way less than the typical middle class person (and way way less than me interestingly, I paid right at 30% of every dollar I made in 2018), and as a % of their wealth they pay VASTLY less than the typical poor person. If you graph the top 10% of the populations income and assets vs the rest of the population over the last 40 years it immediately pops out at you that the very well off are clobbering the rest of the population on a macro level. This isn't about taxes, this is about the share of GDP going to capital instead of labor. Labor is the only real asset the poor/middle class own and it is massively down in terms of income generation potential. This in turn greatly reduces social mobility.

I'm sorry but your attempts to paint the people who have managed to capture basically ALL of the economic growth for the US over the last 40 years as the victims is super weird.

We need new infrastructure, new educational spending, more basic science research, and yes I'd like to scrap our current means tested welfare system (because it's hot garbage that helps trap people in poverty) and go to UBI. We can fund a lot of this by getting rid of our existing healthcare system, (we need our healthcare spending as a share of GDP to be ~12-13% instead of 18%+) downsizing the military (we should be spending ~2-3% of GDP max), and charging people at the tippy top of the pyramid heavily for the balance. I figure the country should be funded by the people who own it.

What you're missing is that I'm seriously worried about the health of the middle class as well. Just because they have enough now doesn't mean they aren't teetering on the brink and massively overladen with debt.

And yes absolutely I worry about political violence brought on by extreme income inequality. I also worry about ACTUAL communists winning elections for the same reasons. I want to do something about income inequality under a capitalist framework. Donald Trump getting elected using a populist message has already resulted in a massive trade war that is already causing me and my customers a significant amount of economic harm. It's going to get worse from here if we don't start at least moving in the right direction.

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